Re: Re: Eglinton Street Tower, Cork

I don’t really understand the ‘my city looks bigger than your city’ stuff that goes on here.

None of Ireland’s city centres are particularly overwhelming. Dublin’s core is essentially a small Georgian city with victorian and edwardian bits added on sorrounded by lots of post 1960s sprawl. As an administrative centre, it has a collection of rather more grandeous buildings than those found elsewhere.

Belfast’s a small, relatively unspectacular victorian industrial city (not saying that’s a bad thing) with lots of urban sprawl.

Cork’s a small slightly more quirky maratime/commerical somewhat georgian city with victiorian institutional, commerical and industrial add-ons and somewhat less urban sprawl.

Limerick, Derry, Galway are extremely small cities with the odd interesting bit of architecture and small scale post 60s sprawl. Their cores are nice, but really not much more extensive than a town.

Anything else is just a big town really.

As for Northern English cities, they’re all rather unspecatcular and small city centrewise too. Many being more highrise than Dublin because there wasn’t a whole lot there to start with, they were largely just industrial centres that were often quite grim. Also, WWII didn’t help much as they lost a lot of buildings to the blitz.

As for Dublin, the Loop Line bridge actually makes the city feel a lot smaller than it is, by isolating the old city centre from the customs house and the whole docklands / IFSC development as well as blocking the view of the harbour and Dublin bay.

It’s really as ugly as one of the ‘green monsters’ in Boston. Shame really it’s not re-routable.

Cork’s Docklands project should be a lot more connected to the City as there isn’t that same “City Centre” vs “Quays” vs “Docks” divide.
The South Mall basically leads straight into the edge of the Docklands. It should have a nice feel when it’s finished!
Even the first parts of the development i.e. new stuff along Lapps Quay is very accessible from the city centre. It doesn’t feel isolated or cut off.

Where as in Dublin the IFSC is very cut off, you wouldn’t really feel like wandering down there on foot.
Smithfield is similar too, completely isolated from the city centre unless you jump in a Luas.
There’s also a very odd divide between the Dublin 1 and Dublin 2 shopping districts. i.e. Grafton Street and Henry Street.
O’Connell Street and O’Connell bridge completely sepeate them. It’s very odd, as you’d really expect there to be much more commercial and retail development on O’Connell street linking the two areas. Never quite understood why O’Connell Street hasn’t developed properly. Is it entirely down to heavy traffic ?

Anyway – perhaps that’s best left to another thread.

I general though, Cork’s quite a well-integrated pedestrian friendly city by Irish standards and seems to be heading rapdily towards being a very pleasant space to wander around.