In 1916 the Civics Institute of Ireland held a competition for suggestions and designs for the city planning of Dublin of which the judges were Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), the Dublin City Architect C.J. McCarthy (1858-1947), and John Nolen. The winner was Patrick Abercrombie of Liverpool University. This competitive design formed the basis of the Abercrombie Report published in 1922 which, apart from recommending a site at Aston Quay for a Central Bus Station, also suggested the removal of Butt Bridge (which was then in a dangerous state) and the completion of the crescent around the Custom House by filling in the redundant dock. Since the dock's construction, the docks had expanded and moved further down river. In addition a new bridge positioned centrally in front of the Custom House was to be constructed and Amiens Street Railway Station extended down to the quayside. All the buildings surrounding the Custom House were to be rebuilt in a Beaux Arts style with the station closing off the Abbey Street vista with a huge colonnade. Abercrombie was influenced personally as an architect by the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and particularly by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891) whose city planning of Paris he admired. It was reported in The Irish Times that Abercrombie felt that it was necessary:
... to complete a crescent surrounding the Custom House with buildings for offices of similar purposes which would form a regular setting for the central building, The design of these buildings as shown in his Dublin report of 1922, was of a Renaissance character but they might quite equally well have been carried out in a more modern idiom. In any case he thought it would have been necessary for the surrounding buildings to be considerably higher than the Custom House.
Nothing ever came of this report and Abercrombie's recommendations were largely ignored. In December 1922 the Greater Dublin Reconstruction Movement published their proposals for the city. This report, like Abercrombie's, advocated extending Amiens Street Station to the quayside and new docks constructed alongside it for passenger services across the Irish Sea. It also suggested the removal of the Loop Line railway bridge and its replacement east of the Custom House which would become the new General Post Office. Again, nothing ever came of this.
Throughout the late 1930s the general public had been agitating through the newspapers for better transport facilities specifically the provision of bus shelters along the quays where long distance bus passengers caught their buses. In 1937 The Irish Builder and Engineer suggested that a Central Bus Station be constructed on the bonding warehouse site next to the disused and abandoned Custom House Dock. It was not the first time that the dock was suggested for use in civic improvements. In 1927 the same journal had reported a far sighted plan to fill the dock with an underground car park for two hundred cars and placing a new road over it to the quayside.
The 1941 Sketch Development Plan for County Borough of Dublin and Neighbourhood by Professor Abercrombie, who was now Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool University, Sydney Kelly, a Liverpool architect, and Manning Robertson (1888-1945) a Dublin based town planner, also proposed a Central Bus Station which was to be sited at Aston Quay on the McBirneys Department Store site keeping the original building frontages.
