fergalr
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Burgh Quay is quite handsome and has real potential… if only its immediate hinterland wasn’t a soulless airlock between the northside and southside. Eden Quay is without a doubt one of the sketchiest streets in Dublin. It’s a really unpleasant place to spend any time. I speak from years of experience queuing for buses there. It can be a properly intimidating spot. There’s nothing there but bus stops and the architectural stock is no better or worse than many other quays.
In Korea they have Starbuckses with multiple floors of seating above the ground floor. It works because there is NO anti social behaviour, just floor after floor of perfectly behaved Koreans, quite a sight lol.
After two years in Seoul, Dublin was very hard to return to because of just this.
Walked past this morning. It’s a rinky dink little place. You wouldn’t order “for here”, believe me.
The DIT campus and new Luas line could inject so much more life into this awkwardly located northside district and would draw immediate northside suburbs like Phibsboro and Drumcondra closer to the city proper. At present, there’s just a gaping hole between the North Circular Rd and O’Connell St, the latter of which will never credibly develop until it has a viable hinterland.
If only there was some way of exorcising Dublin Bus from Broadstone.
The report followed a strategic study by the OPW which examined the scope to develop the Four Courts as a single civil courts complex. That study proposed a new campus-style layout with quads and arcaded links, and where all new buildings would draw their inspiration from the example of the Four Courts building – designed by James Gandon – but in a “contemporary idiom”.
Does that mean the Law Library, a building evidently designed in the dark by a blind man, would be knocked?
I was there yesterday. Internally it’s a bit of a clutter getting between the ground and first floors but the latter is very comfortable and nicely laid out. Very clean. Very bright and airy, as you’d expect with that number of windows. Views up George’s St are great.
Mad props for putting their building number above the door! Dublin businesses are desperate for that.
I dream of a day when that bank building on the corner of Little Mary St on the corner of Capel St is torn down to properly extend the vista west from the Spire.
@StephenC wrote:
Actually, I’m surprised this hasn’t been used to tell us how to get to the National Wax Museum +
Given the general infidelity of Dublin street signs to pointing in the correct direction, this one pointing into Temple Bar will probably soon bear a directions to the National Gallery.
@George_Kaplan wrote:
they should give the next-door telephone exchange (on the corner of Gardiner St) a good lick of paint.
Careful what you wish for. It’s now lovely custard yellow colour.
Wonderful old pictures there. Turns out that Government Bldgs has always had neighbouring structures peering over the parapet.
@lostexpectation wrote:
idiots, always though there wasn’t much room around the building
Not much room in the building either. It’s extraordinary how little thought has gone into the accommodation of the public. There’s seating room for maybe 20-30 people in each courtroom, presuming that they are all the same size. I’ve been up in Court 19 watching the Lillis trial and practicing my shorthand. That public seating is about a third to a quarter of what the four principal courtrooms in the Four Courts could take when the balconies above the courtroom are included.
My second gripe is the lack of crowd control measures. There are pitifully few Courts Service employees to be seen on landings outside the courtrooms. Not only that but the queues that build up invariable take on the usual anarchic Irish scrum shape in front of the door, because no one has had the wit erect some queuing “tape”, like any good bank or cinema would. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if the courtrooms were open to the public when the building opens, like in the Four Courts. In the new building, they are opened at some point around 10:30. What happened to having your punctiliousness rewarded with a seat? (This is a minor gripe from someone who is always on time).
Lastly, there are only four small lifts for the entire building – unless the Law Library and other departments have seperate ones. They are packed with barristers, gardai and joe publics at all hours of the day. Again, not much foresight has gone into the number of people who might stream into the building to watch a criminal case.
Oh… sorry. One more thing. There is an airport-style liquids ban in the building. Didn’t I learn my lesson when I had the cheek to bring a store-bought bottle in with me during the week. Nice little monopoly for the canteen and completely over the top security concerns.
@Peter Fitz wrote:
will look cool lit up though …
So long as you’re downstream of the Loop Line Wall.
Now all that remains is removing those constricting railings and allowing public access to the LH courtyard. How many entrances do TDs need?
@StephenC wrote:
I think the Children’s Court is a problem here. Too much space to hang around in before/after hearings.
I also think the area needs more apartments and more of a family focus.
These large preipheral squares rarely work successfully in my opinion. It just too difficult to create enough activity outside city centre.Smithfield isn’t as peripheral as you might think. The “legal quarter” is all around it, the Luas runs through it and the Guinness Brewery, Collins Barracks, the Phoenix Park and some great old suburbs like Phibsboro are right beside it.
The quays are at their most pleasant from the Four Courts up to Hueston. It’s a sedate part of town, to be sure. But sedate is good. Smithfield needs to be given a point and an immediate hinterland. It has precisely the same problem as O’Connell Street; it’s a crossroads to other points with very little to commend it on its own merits.
Moving the Children’s Court would be one means of removing knackers from the area. It’s one of the most menacing parts of Dublin at any time of the day or night. Not in the same Looney Tunes/Night of the Living Dead sense as Eden Quay… but still bad.
There’s precisely four reasons to visit Smithfield at present.
1 – If you’re a minor being arraigned on a criminal charge.
2 – If you’re a tourist doing the Jameson tour.
3 – If you’re a cinephile going to the Lighthouse.
Or
4 – If you’re going to the lovely Fresh supermarket.
One side of the square is luxury apartments. One side is derelict. One side has three storey Corporation(?) houses – and is mostly derelict – and one side is cut off from the rest by a road and Luas line and is mostly officey stuff in any case.
There are cars strewn about the square. There’s no seating worth mentioning. There’s no attractions particularly worth listing. The only attractions for a local are the moderately pricey supermarket and an up market cinema.
Abject failure for any urban space.
The older trees probably had more time to mature under less polluting conditions than these poor saplings. The amount of exhaust fumes from a single bus pulling away from a bus stop is dire, let alone when they’re simply idling.
Can we run through the buildings whose architectural merit is so considerable that ABP needs to take them into account when considering other sites and proposals?
The GPO?
The last remaining Georgian building o the street up by the Royal Dublin?
Clerys?That’s it, to my mind. Then there are in diminishing order of importance:
The bank buildings dating from the reconstruction of the street in the 20s
The great slab between the Gresham, the Savoy and Burger King.
And what else?Architectural set-piece OCS is not.
