Gardiner St
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I read somewhere that this is the longest street in Dublin and certainly as i walk along it every day on the way to from its beginning at Dorset St to its end at the Custom House, I’d definitely say its a very long street.
Parts of it are very impressive – I like upper Gardiner St., especially the block around the Jesuit church as well as the lower end of the street, full of old Georgian houses filled with hostels and B&Bs. It is undoubtedly a traffic clogged street and could do with a reduction in traffic.
But I have to say the past decade has been most unkind to it in terms of development. It must have some of the worst quality buildings in Dublin – and so many. I think the worst is the apartment building on the corner of Parnell St. and Gardiner St. – dating from 1997, its white paint already peeling off and the maintenance seemingly non-existent.
The stretch from Sean McDermott street to Parnell Street seems to be all council housing apartments. Am I right in this assumption? The designs are attrocious. The 1940’s flat block is none better. The 5 separate apartment blocks consisting the Cosgrove development add nothing to the street either and the gaps in the building line, after the consistency of the Georgian terrace, is a mistake and bad design.
For this reason the only new building that is any good from the outside at least is the Gandon Hall block which directly sides the eastern Georgian terrace, maintaining both that terrace and the building line, fitting it better that most of the street.
Of course I remember when the sites now occupied by these 1990’s apartment blocks were all surface car parks and thought the area a disaster but now that I think of it – those sites had potential. That potential is lost by what has now occupied them. This street is parallel to O’Connell Street and a corridor from the Custom House into the heart of the north inner city – could the developers not have done a better job? Could there not have been a coherent design? Is Luke Gardiner himself the last person, back in the late 1700’s, to have had a plan when he approached development of this street?
There’s now a new building going up beside the Hill 16 pub near the corner of Summerhill and Gardiner St. which is equally crap. This street is a lost cause for what will probably be decades until these blocks degrade to a state when they’ll be demolished (possibly sooner in the case of that 1997 monstrosity).
Any thoughts?
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This is a good observation. Poor Gardiner St had to be one of the finest streets in Dublin when it was designed. A square at the top and a stunning vista down to the Custom House. It is a scandal how it all fell apart, but look at Eccles St, Dominick St etc. All the northside street had the unfortuate luck to be far enough from the ‘Georgian core’ of Merrion and Fitzwilliam to be ignored when tougher planning was required.
I agree most of the stuff built is terrible..even if they were on another street. I hate the old Corpo flats – they are so dated and ugly and do nothing to respect the orignal building line. The new developments are no better. I remember whren Cutsom Hall was built at the start of the apartment boom it was seen as faithful repros of the original Georgians.
I guess what really annoys me though is the condition that the remaining intact stretches of the street is in. All those grotty bedsits and B&Bs.
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Think Pearse Street or even Dorset Street might pip it for length…..
As for the crappy developments on the street from Lower Gardiner Street Flats to that apartment block on the Parnell Street corner, what would anyone recommend as being better, given both the need for social housing in this particular area, and the general demand for accomodation near the city centre? Would it have been utterly wrong to “do a Mountjoy Square” on it, i.e. Georgian replicas? -
There seems an obsessive repulsion for the building of Georgian replicas. I’ve no problem – provided they’re good ones, which they rarely are. I wouldn’t feel ‘fooled’ by a good Georgian-styled building which turned out to be only a few years old the same as I didn’t feel fooled when walking around places like Warsaw Old Town which the Poles finished building in 1984. I do hate bad reproductions though.
But I wouldn’t have recommended Georgian reproductions for the newly developed area of Gardiner St – just good urban design with buildings that could create a specific and most important, attractive, streetscape rather than buildings only concerned with their own pretensions that would have created a disjointed environment.
The Hill 16 pub is an especially bad example which meets the mock Georgian terrace from Mountjoy Sq. at an awkward angle. The building under construction beside it doesn’t even bother to border this pub.
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In regard for the need for social housing – well I can pick out many designs for good social housing. I quite like the Liberty House development off Sean McDermot St as well as the Cumberland St. developments – both of which seem to date from the 1930’s. I also like developments off Pearse St. (actually on Townsend St) from the same era.
It seems good social housing designs stopped in the 1930’s. This is probably a statement for which I’ll be proved wrong but certainly the social housing on Gardiner St. has poor written all over them.
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If you don’t like Gardiner Street now, you should have seen it in the 1980s. It was like something out of Sean O’Casey – a delapidated slum. The unemployment office at the end of the street was a social sore, with hundreds of people queuing outside and surging in when the doors open – indeed RTE filmed it once and the footage became iconic.
The complaints about the modern buildings on Gardiner Street are fine as they go, but at least there are some modern buildings to complain about -
The same could be said of lots of Dublin then – it was the 1980’s after all when you could buy a house for sixpence.
Looking at it, although a kip, the city had potential – some areas have realised the potential, some haven’t. Gardiner St., one block fro O’Connell St, the capital’s premier thoroughfare, hasn’t realised any of its potential and that’s a shame.
Why put so much money into O’Connell St. to, at the same time, ignore the areas all around it.
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Alot of the stairs leading up to the doorways at the top of Gardiner Street are covered by what I think is called terrazzo (correct me if I am wrong, it is the stuff that is always on hospital floors) whilst some of them are tiled. I think this gives them a distinctive quality that many of the restored georgians don’t have. It would be a pity to see any of them loose this if they were to be renovated.
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