By Damian Murphy
The Act to Encourage the Establishment of Banks for Savings in Ireland (1817) aimed to regulate what had been until then an amateurish, often risky, savings bank industry by limiting deposits to £50 per annum and requiring deposits to be lodged with the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt, the body responsible for the investment of State funds. The State paid high interest rates to the trustees, the volunteer directors of each savings bank, which were passed on as dividends to depositors.
The first savings bank opened in the Exchange in Waterford in August 1816, a year before the passing of the Act, and was followed by branches in Dublin (1818), Monaghan (1819) and Limerick (1820). However, it was the Cork branch, and its purpose-built bank under construction on Lapp’s Quay (1835–42), which caught the attention of one of the Waterford trustees, who could ‘see no reason why our Savings Bank should not also commence similar operations’. After they secured a prime site in King Street (now O’Connell Street), a notice in the Waterford Mail (20 January 1841) announced that ‘THE TRUSTEES of the WATERFORD SAVINGS BANK are ready to receive Plans and Specification for a NEW SAVINGS BANK OFFICE agreeably [sic] to the Instructions they have issued’. The ‘Instructions’ are said to have stipulated a Classical style of architecture—a nod to the Italianate origins of modern banking—with the roof to include a clock tower to give the bank a presence visible from the bustling quays, and that the cost of construction should not exceed £4,000.
Twenty-seven designs were submitted. That by the Waterford-born, Belfast-based Thomas Jackson (1807–90) was awarded the first premium of £40. The contract with the builder gave November 1842 as the date for completion but, owing to a labour dispute involving carpenters, it was June 1843 before the trustees convened in their new boardroom for the first time.
The handsome but restrained façade, symmetrical and clad in a golden granite, centres on a temple-like breakfront with a rusticated ground floor and a Corinthian pilastered first floor: the domed cupola that originally rose above the pediment was, sadly, dismantled in 1934. A pair of Ionic in antis door-cases at either end give access to private and public offices respectively.
The banking hall occupies the centre of the ground floor and is filled with light by an arcade of fanlit windows. A top-lit staircase hall gives access to the boardroom overhead, with its deeply coved ceiling embellished with foliate ceiling roses. The boardroom immediately caught the attention of several societies, and at a meeting held in October 1851 ‘a memorial was read, signed by the Mayor, Magistracy, and several of the most respectable inhabitants, requesting that the Trustees would grant the large room … for the purpose of a School of Art’. The school, headed by J.D. Croome, opened in October 1852 and offered classes in drawing and painting as well as lectures in geometry and perspective.
Waterford Savings Bank closed in the 1990s but saw a revival of its artistic pedigree in 2019 when it was repurposed as the latest home of the Waterford Gallery of Art, where the collection includes works by several renowned Irish artists, including Yeats, Henry, Hone and Jellett.
Damian Murphy is Architectural Heritage Officer of the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, Buildings of Ireland: National Inventory of Architectural Heritage.