Facing the gorgeous Guinness power station, there’s this big gable end with a trompe l’oeil arch on it.
The paint colour on the columns and around the typanum (the triangle part of the pediment) match the brick of the street facade quite closely, mimicked by the bands on the parapet and at the top floor level. It’s deeply strange, though – the triangle is close enough to the size and pitch of the roof behind to make it look positively dinky, the black PVC pipe cutting across the arch looks very like the black shadow painted in the reveal of the arch, the band at the pediment level slices the painting into two parts, and when you walk up closer near the railings, the shadows are no longer even close to being at the right angle.
Blank gable ends certainly aren’t pretty, and they’re very common in housing estates where the terrace or row finishes abruptly without the end house being designed differently. With neither the house nor the power station (1946-8) being recently constructed, it’s interesting to imagine when this struck someone as a very big, very visible solution to the situation.
