Lifetime Lab

Attached gable-fronted double-height former boiler house, built 1907, with former economiser house to east. Now in use as interpretive centre. Pitched slate roofs with monitor light and cast-iron rainwater goods. Dormer window with slate hanging to extension. Roughly dressed limestone walls with red brick buttresses to north elevation. Red brick walls laid in English garden wall bond to west elevation having cut limestone to ground floor, limestone and red brick string courses and limestone quoins. Segmental-headed openings to west elevation with red brick voussoirs, now with fixed-light windows. Two cast-iron boilers to interior. Located within former water works complex.

Cork Corporation Waterworks was the oldest continuously used municipal water supply site until its decommissioning in 1993. It is the best-preserved Victorian water pumping station in Ireland, though its earliest operations date to the 1760s, with water being pumped from the river into storage reservoirs in the hillside. The nineteenth-century saw the city growing at a significant rate placing increasing pressure on its water supply. The boiler house was constructed as part of alterations to the site in 1907 and retains two cast-iron boilers to its interior. Its red brick and limestone construction provides a pleasing textural variation to the exterior which elevates the building above its more functional origin. It is an important part of the city’s civil engineering heritage.