jimg
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I would agree that having the board ignore the inspector’s reccommendation is slightly worrying even if I agree with the outcome. However, from what I read in the newspaper, the Inspector’s recommendation to refuse permission was made solely on the basis of their opinion that the Irish Bottle site would be a more suitable location. I don’t have any particular knowledge of this aspect of the planning system but this seems extremely odd; surely the inspector’s remit was to concentrate purely on the proposal being evaluated?
In what way was the Ringsend site deemed “more suitable”? Did the inspector compile a report comparing the two sites in terms of commercial viability, ease of access, strategic development, etc.? In what way is the inspector qualified to pick an alternative “suitable” site for the proposed structure? If the inspector was able to recommend the Irish Bottle site, presumably the inspector must have evaluated it first. Did they also evaluate other locations like Abbotstown or a midlands site for example? If not, where did the choice of Ringsend come from?
To be blunt, it sounds like the inspector failed completely to conduct the appeal properly and, assuming the newspaper reports are correct, the board were correct in ignoring such an oddball and unprofessional recommedation from the inspector.
I agree with a healthy level of suspucion and cynicism but the fact remains the river and the castle are neglected when it comes to tourist amenities, and we should commend the council for looking at ways to make them more open to tourists. Is the boardwalk the right way of doing so, or perhaps, what impact will the boardwalk have on the castle? King John’s Castle should be nationally famous and yet very few people outside Limerick would even know about it.
Sticking a “medieval looking” boardwalk along the one bit of the castle which probably hasn’t changed in over 800 years is not the way to improve the amenity value of the castle. “Medieval” and “boardwalk” are two words which should never appear near each other. That view of the castle has been a Limerick icon for hundreds of years; it has appeared in countless books, publications, logos, etc. F*cking with it amounts to a form of iconoclasm. Talk about familiarity breeding comtempt!
The reason tourists (and Limerick people generally) don’t visit that part of the city is not because the castle or river is in the way; it’s because there’s nothing (besides the castle) of interest on or around Nickolas Street. Addressing this issue – promoting attractions like restaurants, nice pubs or interesting shops – in the area without further damaging the fabric of the castle would be a far more worthwhile use of the council’s time.
@jimg wrote:
I found this old photograph of Pearse St. while dicking about on the web:
It took quite a while for me to find my bearings with the photo as the corner building mirrors Doyles Pub across the street which I found very disorienting. The giveaway is the firestation tower in the background behind the wierd christmas tree thing or whatever it is.Ok it’s a fairly trivial piece of knowledge but I found out what the “weird christmas tree thing” in the above photo is. It was called the Crampton Memorial and apparently Cosgrave’s Illustrated Dictionary of Dublin, has an entry:
The Cramption Memorial at the junction of College-strret with Gt Brunswick-street, was erected from the design of J. Kirk R H A. A paper of 1862 states: ‘The sculptor hopes it will be a monument to himself as well as to Sir P. Cramption’. It is generally called ‘The Water Babe’ but less flattering names have been applied. It consists of a stone base with three drinking fountains]
This fountain has been placed here,
A type of helath and usefulness,
by the friends and admirers,
Of Sir Philip Cramption, Bart.,
Surgeon-General to His Majesty’s Forces,
It but feebly represents
The sparkle of his genial fancy,
The depth of his calm sagacity,
The clearness of his spotless honour,
The flow of his boundless benevolence.
[/align]I’m not sure why but I find it amusing on a number of levels.
I typed the above from a book called The Annals of Dublin Fair City by E E O’Donnell published in time for the millenium (the 1988 one!). I’d love to know more about Cosgrave’s Illustrated Dictionary of Dublin. There’s also a reference to it in John Finerty’s 19th century coffeetable book – Ireland in Pictures. I couldn’t resist buying a copy of the latter even though it’s available in a digitised form on the web. But besides that neither google nor abebooks revealed anything above what sounds like a fascinating book.
If you can forgive DCC’s approval of the garish nighttime lighting, this building clearly attempts to be respectful to its context in a way that very little new city centre “architecture†does and moreover adds reasonably good quality public space to Dame St
I always enjoy hearing a contrarian view but I don’t find your argument convincing. First of all this development took away public space – the previous small park was bigger. Secondly the garish lighting isn’t its only obvious flaw. The galvanised stairwells along the side and the gantry are hardly respectful, the scale (about 70% taller than the Sick&Indigents) is not respectful, the way it ignores the line of the street is not repsectful and the bunker like ground floor could hardly be less inviting.
Would they not leave the castle alone? 😡 It’s about the only bit of medieval Limerick left (along with St. Mary’s Cathedral) with any sort of structural integrity. And no, that “medieval house” or pub or whatevet it is they built on the Island a few years ago doesn’t count. It’s bad enough that they ran bulldozers through it in the 50s but the newer “interpretative centre” is highly innappropriate and unsympathetic also in my opinion. Now they’re proposing to compromise the remaining decent view of the Castle (from Clancy’s Strand or Thomond gate) with a boardwalk? Maybe they should just get rid of the river wall altogether since it’s getting in the way of a proposed tourist route. :rolleyes: Let’s face it, the council have the opposite of the “midas” touch when it comes to the historical fabric of Limerick. I dread to think of the state St. Mary’s Cathedral would be in if it had been in the council’s hands for the last 50 years.
I’ve tried fiddling with these figures in Excel. The present value of the government’s deal is simply €600 million (given the fact that the payments are adjusted for inflation). Trying to get the present value of the revenue stream that NTR are foregoing to match this (on the basis that the current average daily traffic is 85,000 vehicles) requires some rather fantastic projections or measures of current profitability.
For example, one way (to make the deal seem reasonable for the tax payer) is to assume that they currently make an average profit of 1 euro per vehicle and that they expect a steady 10% per annum increase in traffic volumes. Neither of these seem realistic to me. Alternatively, if they are currently making on 50c per vehicle, this would require a projected volume growth of 18%.
Never mind the fact that a 10% annual growth in traffic would require a doubling of capacity every 7 years (and the associated construction costs) or that I’ve made no provision for systemic risk; obviously being guaranteed €50m a year is much more valuable than operating a business which might well be threatened by projects like the new outer orbital motorway or the public transport elements of Transport21.
However I’m not that surprised. I have some highly qualified friends who work in the civil service but none seem to have any appreciation for the nuances of financial planning (even one with an MBA seems to think that concepts like present value and discounting are largely academic). Looking at the rates of return the government has offered (and continues to offer) for PPP projects demonstrates that they think in terms of cash. The nearest analogy is with individuals who think they’re getting a good deal buying things on hire-purchase or using expensive car financing deals or sticking everything onto a large credit card balance. I guess governments by their nature discount future payments heavily – after all they may not be around to have to face the music.
The fact that the entire Dail was mobilized to have an emergency sitting out-of-hours in order to rush through legislation to ensure the VHI don’t lose €34 while a deal like this – where the loss to the public purse could be 10 times as much – is presented as a fait accompli shows how perversely the government (and public sector in general) prioritise financial issues.
Wow. I’ve been out of the country for the last two weeks and didn’t have time to check archiseek while away. I was almost expecting this thread to just wither away. What a change – I’m delighted! 🙂
I’m so relieved that this issue is receiving the critical attention that it deserves – not only here but politically and in the broader media.
Talk is relatively cheap – it’s easy to post moany messages on internet message boards; I’m a master at it. I’ve great admiration for the others who’ve made the far more significant effort to take this issue to the people who count like politicians and media workers. I just hope this horrible proposal will be defeated but at least the situation certainly looks a bit more optimistic than it did when I was packing my bags 15 days ago!
I can’t find it using Google or the site search function but there was an article on Henrietta Street in the Sunday Times, yesterday. Among all the lofty aspirational statements from the council, there wasn’t a single mention of the irreparable damage done to the steet and it’s context by the appartment block on the corner. If I hadn’t seen the state of the street recently with my own eyes and through the photos on this page, the article would have given me hope as it’s all very positive. The council are very well coached for dealing with the media, I must say.
The funny thing is that there was no mention at all of the work on the footpath but obviously neither the reporter nor the council spokesperson had the neck to simply not mention it at all. So in the middle of the article, with no context or prior mention, there’s a sentence to the effect that the work on the footpath is “temporary” as they are trying to source old granite. I reckon this is pure spin; I imagine that it was only after the contractors left the site that, even with their myopia, they realised what a horrible mistake they’d made and now they’re trying to wriggle out of accepting responsibility for it. I mean come on! You don’t use granite – even cheap stuff – for temporary footpath surfacing. :rolleyes:
Sorry to be vague but there was also mention that the next thing on their agenda was the bollards. Having seen what they did to the footpath, this gives me a sinking feeling – how about some nice shiney polished stainless steel bollards to match that new granite? 😀 Out with the angle grinders, lads, there’s a few square holes to be cut out the old curbstones and bring a bucket of cement to secure the new bollards.
Interestingly, their midas touch with heritage is mirrored in their legal department. They are being sued by the previous owners of two of the buildings that the council CPOed a couple of years ago because of some dodgy sale they tried to arrange. Again, it smacks of headless chicken stuff with no long term plan for what they were going to do once the CPO was done.
As an exercise I’ve analysed the distribution of the location of these things using newgrange’s list. Here are the numbers per postcode:
- 11 – Dublin 1
- 8 – Dublin 3
- 8 – Dublin 17
- 8 – Dublin 12
- 7 – Dublin 9
- 7 – Dublin 11
- 5 – Dublin 8
- 4 – Dublin 7
- 4 – Dublin 4
- 2 – Dublin 5
- 2 – Dublin 2
- 2 – Dublin 10
- 1 – Dublin 15
70% of them are in the northside, which is striking. It is disappointing as areas like Dorset St, Bolton St. and Parnell St. are very central. All 19 of the Dublin 1 and 3 ones are in built-up city areas but near “high rented and public housing” as newgrange observed. The Dublin 5 and 7 ones are a mixed bag – about half are objectionable in my opinion. At least in the outer postcodes, like Dublin 17, the locations are “semi-industrial or flank major road arteries (as distinct from streets)” as Graham describes it.
On the southside, Dublin 12 predominates but the locations are semi-industrial and so are not objectionable. 3 of the ones in Dublin 8 would also (arguably fall into this category). Of course the Dublin 4 ones are not anywhere near Donnybrook but around Irishtown but they’re mostly near the east link bridge so again might be excused. The two in Dublin 2 are on Pearse St (near Maken Street) which certainly wont improve this section of street. The two in Dublin 10 are on the Kylemore Rd – without knowing the exact locations, I’d say fair enough.
Just over 80% of them are positioned on “public footpaths” and so will impede and take away space from pedestrians. A retrograde step surely which contradicts the councils own planning goals I imagine?
Many of the sites are “clustered” – i.e. two or three very near each other or just across the street or on different corners. I can only assume that this is tactical – even if half of the sites are successfully objected to, they will still get the “coverage” they are seeking. It’s like applying to build a 10 story building knowing that they’ll lop off 2 when you wanted to build an 8 story to begin with.
Im quite supportive of these. They are in most other cities I have been in and seem to work fine. They should also lead to two positive developments – a reduction in billboards and an improvement in the provision of maps and tourist information (at least that is how I understood it – although we can’t always believe what we hear!)
What exactly would be the point of putting maps and tourist information on the back of 10 foot wide advertising boards which are monted 6 or 8 feet above the ground? You’d have to hand out free periscopes in the airport to arriving tourists. The size, design and locations of these advertising boards make it very clear that they are designed to target people in motorised vehicles and not strolling tourists. In this respect, I wouldn’t have a huge problem if they were confined to the dual carraigeways – like the N2 or the Malahide Rd, for example – which are already effectively dedicated to motorised traffic anyway and where they wouldn’t take up valuable street or footpath space and wouldn’t compete visually with the built heritage of Dublin. However have a look at the list of locations; they include very central areas close to historic buildings and in places where pedestrians and cyclists are currently in (losing) competition with motorised traffic. These advertising boards reinforce the idea that the primary purpose of places like Dorset St or Parnell St, for example, are to facilitate motorised traffic.
Also, there is something cynical about the locations chosen for these ads; they’re all are in less “posh” areas where I assume JCDeuax imagine that the locals are unlikely to object. There are none planned for places like Donnybrook or Ballsbridge, for example, but plenty for all the northside traffic routes into the city.
I don’t buy the argument that it will reduce billboard advertising. The amount of billboard advertising has, through deliberate council policy, been slowly reduced almost to insignificance over the last 10 or 15 years with notable successes like clearing the loopline bridge. At a stroke, this will effectively reverse this slow and carefully executed policy. The fact that the boards are mounted on two stainless steel poles instead of on the sides of buildings doesn’t strike me as being hugely significant.
So why were bollards deemed necessary here?
’cause they’re stainless steel and so by definition (like covering areas with cheap granite, plonking down useless kiosks and plazifying open areas), sticking them into the footpath is cool and adds credibility to the scheme and shows that DCC are forward looking. :rolleyes:
Oh you mean in terms of providing function or form or complementing for historic urban fabric? I’ve no idea.
@GrahamH wrote:
Just out of interest jimg, given overhead wires generally don’t concern you (not being smart here), how do you rate them relative to your rather vociferous objection to the proposed advertising hoardings about the city?
Hi Graham, I was exaggerating a bit when I said the overhead wires are a non-issue for me. I can see the attraction in a third rail system for the centre but I know that cost/benefit analysis would not support it at the moment. Everyone will have personal views on the aesthetics of street clutter; for you the wires are a major problem. For me, the fact that the poles are properly vertical (unlike 80% of the traffic signs in the city), polished stainless steel (rather than mottled galvanized) and set in a regular pattern (rather than shoved into a gouged hole with a bucket of cement slopped in for support) means I find Luas clutter much less objectionable than the hundreds of superfluous street signs, badly planted trees, poorly placed telephone boxes, etc along the stretch in question. I find Luas fittings only slightly more intrusive than the new street lighting on O’Connell Street for example.
What worries me is that this new route F doesn’t address any of flaws of route A but it manages to add plenty of new disadvantages. The worst for me will be a new bridge between O’Connell Bridge and Butt Bridge; this will destroy the relatively regular pattern of bridges in the city and will create an ugly cluster of bridges around Butt bridge.
Seing as all the other options have been removed from consideration, would you not agree that A is far preferable to this new mongrel route?
Yes, I’ve been to Holland and Germany many, many times. Thankfully in this day and age, with universal access to information, I do not have to personally conduct an investigation into each such scheme nor record my experiences of such schemes in order to have an opinion. If you are really interested, try google or wikipedia for a summary of the failures (and successes) of such schemes. In summary, the cost of maintanance per bike in large cities has been proven to be unsustainable. Thus DCC’s plan to pawn our streetscape vistas for advertising in order to support this scheme.
The only thing going for such schemes is a weird sort of commie/hippy appeal as there are simply no other tangible benefits. You can buy a new bike and lock for less that the cost of maintaining one of these rental bikes for a single year. I know of nobody who would like to cycle around the city but cannot afford a bike so these schemes are a solution to a non-existing problem. On the off chance that someone tries cycling because of the availability of these bikes, the unpleasant experience of cycling in the city is likely to turn them off forever. If DCC were serious about encouraging cycling in the city then they could start to do something to improve the cycling environment. Unfortunately this would be a mildly challenging task. It’s much easier to engage in shallow tokenism: prostitute the aesthetics of the city, have a few special bike racks installed around the place with 50 yellow bikes and then line up for the photo ops, the special features with a credulous media (I can imagine the introduction to the feature on the RTE news) and pat each other in the back while the bikes get thrown in the Liffey and cycling in Dublin remains a mode for the brave and the bold.
…well wait ’til you see the proposal being “negotiated” between the council and JCDecaux. 70 ten foot wide commercial advertising signs mounted on 6 foot poles are to be erected at “strategic” points on streets around the city. In addition there will be a large number of smaller advertising signs.
There are a number of disturbing aspects about this project. The most important is obviously the horrible aesthetic consequences. The second is the sneaky way that the proposal is being put through planning; 70 individual applications – thus potentially costing 1400 euro for an individual to object – lodged the week before Christmas, hoping that people wont have enough time to object. Even if only half of the signs fail in planning they will still have a terrible visual impact on the city – especially on streets which are already suffering with too much traffic. Another disturbing aspect is that the council are complicit in this vandalism; in exchange for allowing these signs the company will install some sort of bicycle rental stations. To me this represents the worst kind of shallow environmental tokenism; I wonder how many Dubliners are dying to cycle around the place but simply can’t afford the likes of the 100 euro Lidl bike I use? However the idea of this failed european experiment in bicycles for the masses is probably marxist enough to have the support of the environmental lobby. If the experiment fails (which it will) we’ll be stuck with these huge ads cluttering up the streets.
Sometimes I wonder whether the council have improved since the 60s.
So it looks like we’ll be getting the worst of all worlds: a new bridge and a needlessly complex and confusing route with no extra integration with DART while still not addressing the non-issues (for me) of construction on O’Connell Street and poles on College Green.
@Irish Times wrote:
The proposed route from St Stephen’s Green, to be announced today, would run as a double track to College Green, where it would change to single track and run north via Westmoreland Street, O’Connell Bridge and along the west side of O’Connell Street.
It would turn into Cathal Brugha Street and then run south along Marlborough Street, crossing the Liffey on a new bridge and continuing via Hawkins Street and College Street to rejoin the double track section at College Green.
Compared to what you’ll find in glossy architecture books, they may be “bland and uniteresting” but compared with the masses of apartments that have filled the city (especially around this area – Christchurch, Patrick St, etc.) during the last 15 years, this looks like a big step up.
Maybe it was the crisp winter light this morning but I thought the new median and trees look really good on Dorset St. Once the footpaths are redone – hopefully salvaging the old kerbstones – I think the street will have improved greatly. The median breaks the out-of-scale width of the street (in proportion with much of building stock). The aspects which make the street ugly may actually end up make it very attractive – a lack of historic coherence and the mismatch of scales and usage. Hopefully the improvements in the public fittings will be reflected by similar improvements in the private stock, a process that seems to have started already.
The ripping up of the extensive tram system in the 50’s.
The prosperity which brought widespread car ownership and made car use affordable resulting the sprawl of Leinster.Out of curiosity, is it the aesthetics or the social dignity of the idea that appeals to you? Or both?
There’s an element of “it’s sounds crazy but it just might work, capt!” to it’s appeal I admit. But it’s not so much that I fondly imagine that everyone will be tipping their caps and bidding each other top o’ the morning as they pass each other in the street and that goodly neighbourly relations will once again reign over society. It’s just that the current system just creates an unpleasant urban environment – particularly for cyclists and pedestrians. The most unappealing areas of Dublin for me are those with the most segregation and where all movement is governed by rules – for example at Christchurch – where railings and lights direct the movement for pedestrians, cyclists are chaparoned into unsuitable separate “lanes” and motorized vehicles perform a huge coordinated dance. Also I probably harbour some anti-authoritarian sympathies and have never viewed obeying rules for their own sake particularly virtuous. However for me, the most important benefit, it this approach works, would be in terms of safety and the least important would be the aesthetic benefits even if considerable.
Besides your cute Keith Richards analogy, I’m I don’t see the basis for you being so dismissive. Not everyone shares your belief that the it’s only the exceptional innate superiority of the Dutch that allows such a system to work given that there are pilot programs and concrete plans in many different European countries including with our neighbours across the Irish sea. There are already small parts of Dublin – like Temple Bar – which effectively operate on this basis as stated. Many Italian towns and villages operate using an informal version of such a system and in my experience are very pleasant environments in which both to drive (slowly) and walk and the Italian stereotype certainly is very different to that of the Dutch.
