Tuborg

@pigtown wrote:

I don’t think a shopping proposal on the scale that was envisaged was ever viable. It would have drawn business’ and customers away from the existing retail core and would have had an overall negative impact on the city centre. In my opinion, had this gone ahead and filled all of the units then people would have had little reason to go anywhere in the city.

I think you are overestimating the extent of the so called retail core if that’s even an appropriate term to use given the paucity of the current offering. Realistically Limericks shopping district currently stretches from the O’Connell Street/Roches Street junction down as far as Denmark Street along with some of the adjoining streets and laneways. Hardly what you would call expansive!

If you recall, up until 5 or so years ago Rutland Street and Lower Patrick Street were lined with a variety of businesses; retail stores, cafes etc before the misguided decision to remove the occupants before redevelopment plans were even finalised. So this portion of the city centre was/is very much part of the commercial zone.

In reality though the quality of Limericks retail line-up has evolved disappointingly since the Cruises Street project opened over 20 years ago now. William Street for example never capitalised on the momentum created along with the increased footfall in its vicinity and the opportunity to freshen up the street was lost. It has stagnated at best since.

Similarly with O’Connell Street we saw only modest investment in retail premises even throughout the excesses of the “boom” years. The former Sony centre outlet has been vacant and up for sale for a number of years at this stage. The former Fergusons chemist across the street likewise. The calibre of many businesses on the street currently is poor and significant renovation and possibly amalgamation of properties is needed to attract new, higher quality tenants. There’s no sign that this is forthcoming and you can’t exactly usurp the existing occupants either.

@pigtown wrote:

It seems like I’m disagreeing with everything you say but I’m not sure that the city needs another street, not when we already have so many dead streets in the city. Also I think developments like Opera Lane and City Central really detract from a city. All of the shopfronts look the same and there is no variety. It’s almost like a shopping centre.

You might not be a fan but in fairness that City Central development along with the pedestrianisation scheme completely revitalised Bedford Row. It brought high quality retail and residential accommodation along with a five star hotel to the city centre on what was a neglected and decaying site. Do you remember how dingy it looked previously? Take a look at the attachments below. :thumbdown:

The project also attracted the first significant batch of retailers in to the city centre for many years, most of them not represented in Limerick previously. All the units are fully let too. It’s clear that in order to entice quality brands in to the city centre accommodation of an appropriate size and standard is required. I believe a project similar to that on Bedford Row could work well for the opera centre site. By bringing in fresh blood and more footfall one would hope that it would provide a knock-on benefit to the city centre at large.

@pigtown wrote:

What I would like to see in the site is loads of modern office space. If you consider that that any decent sized company wanting to set up in the city would probably need to build their own office building first, a large quantity of good quality office space would be a major asset. I don’t believe it should be used for retail as there are plenty of sites nearer to the core that have been identified in the most recent city development plan that are suitable for large scale developments.

I’m not convinced that the opera site is best suited to a large office development. Sure it might bring further employment in to town but large scale office blocks generally provide quite a dead, dull street presence and won’t exactly draw people in to the city except for the employees obviously. An element of office space could of course be accommodated but I wouldn’t like to see the majority of the site given over to it.

There are other locations that are more suitable for this purpose. The half built GPO/hanging gardens development which is in NAMA was to contain a large amount of office space over 6 floors or so. It should be a priority to have this completed at the earliest opportunity. The former ESB building and eventually Henry Street Garda headquarters provide another large scale redevelopment opportunity on the quays along with the portion of the docklands that SFPA are looking to offload. A significant amount of office space is currently vacant in the building at the corner of Thomas Street/Catherine Street as well.

@pigtown wrote:

A master plan for the future development of the entire city has been commissioned and is due for publication and I think any decisions on the site before this is published would have been grossly negligent of the council.

I admire you optimism but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’ve lost count of the number of glossy city centre strategies and development plans that have been released over the years. They’re hardly worth the paper they’re printed on. This will simply be a regurgitation of the same aspirational spiel which is churned out endlessly and that the City Council have neither the ability nor the will to follow through on!

Game over it would seem.

Six years on from the first planning application and the site remains untouched and significantly worse for wear.

On the one hand it’s somewhat encouraging to finally see some movement on this. Afterall it is over two years since An Bord Pleanala handed down their final verdict. However I find it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm at the prospect of the State overseeing the regeneration of this area. We’ll probably end up with more social housing units being developed. :crazy:

The existing plans are not without their flaws of course. But I reckon the shopping complex would have been the safest bet in terms of kick starting the process of injecting some life back into the city centre. A city centre that urgently needs to improve it’s dwindling retail offering.

The spin off effects from this development could have been a catalyst for the renewal of other under utilised sites in the surrounding area. The so called market quarter for instance has huge potential and we should be encouraging more cafes. restaurants, bars etc to set up there.

Overall Limerick City Council have as usual been extremely slow off the mark and blew a golden opportunity over the last decade or so to market this area for investment. You could argue aswell that had they adopted a more proactive approach during the planning stages of the opera centre. The complex could well have been up and running by now.

@Peter Fitz wrote:

More pics on the indo.

http://www.independent.ie/photo-galleries/aviva-stadium-2116086.html

This view in particular is pretty disappointing!

Overscaled, bent steelwork and the clumsy fashion in which the roof slopes down to that miserable northern end. All terribly incongruous!

@tommyt wrote:

I personally don’t buy this argument. A fair and proper Ticket allocation system (yeah I know, I know..) you would hope would insure a partisan, passionate and vocal home support in a relatively intimate stadium built for competitive international field sports.

Either way I’ll be watching on the telly so I won’t be getting too worked up whether the ground can cater for presumed demand.

Ah but you see, it’s a different story entirely if you actually want to go to a game!

Less than 39,000 tickets for the real fans and that dosen’t include the away supporters allocation!

@publicrealm wrote:

The IRFU was willing to move to a new site (it bought a site specifically to provide for this eventuality) but the site options report conclusively pointed to Lansdowne Road.

The ground will be fully completed this Summer. A compromise certainly but, as I said earlier, the best available outcome (in the real world).

Well the ABP inspector recommended that planning be refused as if I recall correctly the site was deemed to be unsuitable for a modern International stadium. It only got off the ground after the board over-ruled the planning report!

Below is an extract from the report.

The results of the site selection process do not, as suggested in the EIS and other documentation, clearly indicate that the Lansdowne Road site was the best site. There is a considerable weight of evidence to suggest that the Ardagh site would be more suitable for a modern international stadium.

It’s interesting that there are considerably less shots of the bus shelter end in comparison to the rest of the stadium. It’s hardly deliberate though! 😮

The stadium bowl reminds me of a scaled down version of the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, (which holds 65,000 btw!) Externally, Lansdowne will be much more pleasing on the eye but thats not really the point is it? It’s the quality of what’s inside that counts and you can’t really dress up that single tiered end as anything other than a failure!

It’s difficult to be exact but from what I can see anyway, there only appears to be in the region of 10 rows of seating at that end! That is going to look piss poor and will surely have an impact on the atmosphere inside the ground aswell!

Estadio da Luz

Hardly a surprise really is it?

Essentially the gist of this is that the development company may be able to secure the necessary funding but then again it probably won’t! 🙁

I must say I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for Regeneration Developments. Their stewardship of the project has been qestionable to say the least. This shambolic mess could easily have been avoided had it not been for a series of poor decisions in the design and planning stages! :rolleyes:

That cropped Havelock Square end certainly gives the stadium quite a strange shape when viewed from the air!

On the whole, it’s going to be a terrific venue for Irish sport but unfortunately theres no getting away from the fact that the capacity is just too small!! 🙁

@tretle wrote:

I heard from a retailer right next to the proposed development that they are need about 20 million before the thing can go ahead.

Id say that’s a bit on the conservative side tretle. Over the last 18 months or so there was absolutely no indication whatsoever that Regeneration Developments had access to the kind of finance that was needed to fund this project.

Now that the Opera Centre has gone to the incomprehensible mess they call NAMA, it really is anyone’s guess as to when we’ll see any action! Although many of the building’s on site will probably be close to structural failure at that stage! 😡

Hollowed out by the ‘doughnut’ effect (Irish Times)

LIMERICK IS a doughnut, according to the city centre’s retailers, and they don’t mean it as a compliment. With a fat ring of suburban shopping malls swallowing up available spenders into their inviting car parks, there’s a traffic-ensnared retail void right at the place where most cities tend to keep their busiest hubs of commercial activity: the centre.

Now a major plan to resuscitate the city’s retail heart has been derailed by the banking crisis. The 410,000sq ft Opera Centre, a €350 million project in which Anglo Irish Bank had a 50 per cent stake, has stalled indefinitely, the undeveloped site a bleak reminder of the ambition of the boom years.

For many city shopkeepers, however, lacklustre footfall along Limerick’s main arteries is a problem that originates decades ago, predating both Anglo’s hubris and Dell’s devastating redundancies.

“Really, the city council neglected the city and took its eye off the ball for 20 years,” says David O’Mahony, the chairman of O’Mahony’s bookshop, which trades over several well-stocked storeys on O’Connell St.

“It’s insane that the situation has been allowed to exist for so long,” he sighs.

The “situation” is that three separate councils have jurisdiction over the area that essentially makes up the city: Limerick City Council, Limerick County Council and Clare County Council.

The result of this administrative mishmash is that a string of shopping centres received permission to be built beyond the city’s patch, leaving those that were left in the centre floundering. “Like baubles on a necklace,” is how one person describes Limerick’s retail pattern – a more flattering description than a doughnut, perhaps, but no less dismaying for the city vendors fighting to attract a finite number of customers.

“No one in the city centre was unduly upset that the Parkway was shelved or the Crescent was refused its extension,” says O’Mahony.

The unfinished Parkway was a Liam Carroll speciality that started building before it had nailed down an anchor store. The brand-packed Crescent, located just past the city boundary in Dooradoyle, is already the biggest shopping centre outside the greater Dublin area, with Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Next, HM, River Island, Monsoon and HMV all under its highly convenient roof. The Crescent was this year refused permission to expand again after the city council told a Bord Pleanála hearing that enough was enough: the city cannot be sacrificed to the suburbs.

“Most large urban centres would want to see the core supported first before you build around it,” says Tom Mackey, city manager of Limerick, matter-of-factly.

An application seeking the extension of the city council’s remit is sitting on the in-tray of Minister for the Environment John Gormley. “It would unite the city as one entity,” says Mackey.

In the meantime, Mackey is trying to unsnarl Limerick’s streets of its HGVs: the completion of an orbital route and building of a tunnel will allow for the pedestrianisation of O’Connell Street and the widening of the William Street footpaths, following an attractive pedestrianisation of Thomas Street and Bedford Row.

“To some extent, we’re very dependent on Government funding,” Mackey says ominously.

“Naturally, recession does slow things down.”

And the Opera Centre? “It’s hard to predict when it will be built,” he says.

For Oliver Moloney, founder of the Instore chain of furniture and giftware stores, the shame was that several businesses near his own Ellen Street store closed down to make way for the Opera.

“There was a bicycle shop, a butchers, a bar/restaurant,” he says, listing them.

“They created traffic for us. The pity was that it got that far and they sold their leases. But nobody knew what was coming, except for maybe David McWilliams. From the city council perspective, they’ve lost a lot of rate income.”

Like all analogies, the “doughnut” shape of Limerick is not a perfect fit. Apart from department stores Brown Thomas and Debenhams and a splattering of international fashion brands, the city centre also has something that tends not to be replicated in most standard-fit, inward-facing, privately developed shopping centres: independents.

“There are lots of brilliant independent traders on Roches Street,” notes former TV3 news reporter Laura Ryan, who, as Limerick City co-ordination officer, now has the job of promoting her native city.

“Tonight I’m going shopping with a girlfriend and we’re going to go for a glass of wine after. I’m not going to do that in a shopping centre,” she says.

Still, the Opera Centre would be a plus, Ryan thinks, especially if it managed to secure Marks Spencer, which is currently not in Limerick, but has toyed with several possible locations, including the rejected Crescent extension.

“I lived in Dublin for nine years and I have withdrawal symptoms from MS. Definitely, they would do so well in Limerick,” she says.

The weekend before last, Ryan helped organise Winterfest, a co-ordinated effort by Limerick’s retailers to entice people to shop. But although the event – which included a Georgian Quarter market, a range of discounts and a free-parking initiative – was a success, the Winterfest weather was too wintry for some.

The bad luck was encapsulated by the fate of the city council’s “green tree”. Plans to place the 100ft recycled-steel tree in the river were undone when the swelling waters allowed it to break free of its momorings and crash into Shannon Bridge. “It was always going to end up in the river,” says Ryan wryly.

Back in O’Mahony’s bookshop, there’s a display of “where did it all go wrong” economic books, while David McWilliams is due to pop in a couple of nights later to sign copies of his latest work.

O’Mahony, who sells academic as well as consumer titles, is enduring the “complete ripple effect” from Dell. “There’s been a massive drop in the resources of students and the resources of their parents as well,” he says.

O’Mahony has another hat – he is chairman of the Limerick Market Trustees, a historic body charged since the mid-19th century with operating or licensing any market that takes place in Limerick city “or one mile beyond”. But this involved “a significant amount of time spent running car parks”, he says. So the trustees began what’s now costed as a €2 million project to transform the Limerick Milk Market from a Saturday morning market to a six-day operation, with a weatherproof umbrella structure and five permanent units.

Earlier this month, with tenders awarded at recession-tastic competitive prices, the diggers finally moved into the cut-stone courtyard, not far from both Moloney’s Ellen Street store and the site of the Opera Centre.

“The Milk Market could be an events venue, it could be an outside broadcast area, it could be a cinema,” says O’Mahony, who hopes it will improve the city’s footfall when it opens in mid-2010.

“Limerick needs attractions, it needs places to visit. It has the river, it has the Hunt Museum, it has the retail diversity. But if you’re going into Limerick city centre, where are you going?”

The “community dimension” to the Milk Market will provide new opportunities for the local micro-enterprises that are expected to spring up in the wake of the closure of Dell’s manufacturing plant, O’Mahony adds. The city needs this more than any major retail scheme, he believes.

“With shopping centres, all you’re doing is replicating a theoretically English model and that is not what will help Limerick.”