History & Building

Our History

In 1991, The Arts Council secured a long-term lease from Dublin City Council on the recently decommissioned Fire Station building on Buckingham Street to create space for visual artists to work and live in Dublin’s north-east inner city.

After some negotiations, the Arts Council and NCCCAP (the North Centre City Community Action Project, a community organisation which provided training to young people from the locality), it was agreed that the Fire Station building would house residential studios for visual artists as well as becomming the headquarters of the NCCCAP.

In 1993, Fire Station Artists’ Studios became legally independent from the Arts Council, while retaining its core function of providing living and working spaces for artists.

In 2014, Fire Station Artists’ Studios celebrated the renovation of 12 Buckingham Street. The expansion increased its provision of residential studios and includes a space for events and talks.

In 2019, NCCCAP fused with other local community organisations and left its premises at FSAS. The space was repurposed into additional workspaces for artists working in Digital Media and Sculpture practices.

In 2023, Fire Station Artists’ Studios will celebrate its 30^th anniversary. The organisation continues to enable visual artists to live and work in the heart of Dublin City centre and works with the communities through a variety of programmes. It is proud to be supported by Arts Council Ireland and Dublin City Council.

Location and Building

Fire Station Artists’ Studios is located in an iconic red-brick building on Buckingham Street, on the doorstep of Dublin City centre.

Purpose-built by Dublin Corporation as a fire station, the building was completed in 1900 and is considered one of the first modern fire stations in the city. The site was decommissioned as a working fire station in the early 1980s, and a new site serving the central Dublin area was created on North Strand.

Buckingham Street was once part of Georgian Dublin’s most fashionable district. The passing of that era, the proximity of the docks and the development of the city northwards saw workers and their families put down the roots of a community that still exists today.

For the past thirty years, drugs and their devastating effects have been a fact of life for people living in the area. The project ‘Home’, Leo Higgins’ sculpture project–managed by and partly made in the Fire Station–is permanent testament to a community surviving and fighting back. It is also a reminder of the ongoing relationships we have within our locality.

We look to our neighbours, the Irish Financial Services Centre and Dublin Docklands, both of which have brought new life and regeneration into the north inner city. The reclaimed buildings, reshaped spaces, and the more recent empty urban office blocks and apartments are symbols of the ambivalent nature of Ireland’s recent economic prosperity and subsequent downturn. These spaces, with their constituent communities and the new immigrant populations who have settled there, all contribute to how we think about our neighbourhood.