Birdseye view of Dublin looking towards the Dublin Mountains with the General Post Office on Sackville Street in the foreground from Nelson's Pillar , a large granite pillar topped by a statue of Lord Nelson, located in the centre of O'Connell Street in Dublin. Erected three years after his death in 1808 to honour Admiral Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, before the similar Nelson's Column was erected in London in 1849. The pillar was a Doric column that rose 121 ft (36.8 m) from the ground and was topped by a 13 ft (3.9 m) tall statue in Portland stone by Cork sculptor Thomas Kirk, RHA (1781-1845), giving it a total height of 134 ft (40.8 m) – some 20 metres shorter than the more famous Nelson's Column in London. It was designed by Francis Johnson (1760-1829), the architect who built the General Post Office (to the left of the picture opposite). Johnson and later architects laid out Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) so that the buildings, the GPO and the Pillar were in scale to the size and length of the street and to each other. The pillar became both a tram terminus and a common meeting place for Dubliners and offered the city's best public viewing platform, reached by spiral stairway inside the column.