Reign of Fire: Inside The Pigeonhouse

I finally got to look inside the old redbricked Pigeonhouse (i.e. Poolbeg) power station, built around 1903. My guide was the wonderful Paddy Higgins, from Dublin's Waste Water Treatment Plant nearby. He is himself interested in the local history and before heading to the old building we had a long chat, about the Poolbeg Peninsular, Ringsend, Irishtown, the water treatment business (during rain storms it can pump a million tons a day) and people who once lived in the area, such as John Pidgeon, after whom Pigeonhouse Road is named. Paddy showed me some striking photographs which some of the older residents from Ringsend had given him, including this one, which shows the local man as a boy in the early 20th century, standing with his friend on a rubble-strewn South Wall, with the then not-so-old power station smoking in the background.

The power station is now a listed building. The corporation bought it off the ESB in the 1990s and I'm sure the latter were glad to get rid of it. The asbestos has been removed, along with all the floors, but it has left the building's supporting girders open to corrosion from the elements. Paddy told me that they shot scenes from the dragon-apocalypse movie Reign of Fire here (the building standing in for a burnt-out London where the mother of all dragons had its lair). I can see why. It's a huge shell, an impressive, echoey, industrial cathedral. I managed to get some filming in, and I was especially keen to record the sounds: magnified rain drops, pigeon-shufflings and fluttering and cooings... a wonderfully rich sound-box, as fantastic in its way as that other purpose-built prayer-vessel, Cologne Cathedral, intricate Medieval stonework like barnacles encrusting, forming over a century (a building which actually deserves that too-easily-reached-for superlative, awesome).