City Quarter defies critics

Tommy Barker views the €100 million City Quarter development.

WHEN Taoiseach Bertie Ahern launches the €100 million City Quarter development next week it will mark a turning point in Cork’s relationship to its docklands and riverside.

Confounding initial sceptics, the ambitious urban and quayside development has pushed the boat out in terms of vision, investment and realisation - and now it is about to pull the boats back in again, this time with a floating pontoon as well as the southern city’s first boardwalk.

The development, designed by Scott Tallon Walker architects for Howard Holdings, has apart even from the buildings created a world-class urban space, with pedestrian plaza with newly planted lime trees picking up on the South Mall’s mature trees, 90 metre long boardwalk, kiosks selling drinks and pandering to coffee-culture, covering canopies and awnings, space heaters, all on a south-facing river site with further big, bright and shiny new developments set to flow across the river on Albert Quay.

City Quarter will act as a pivot in around which further city development spring, and at last re-orders its relationship to the river. And this coming Summer’s buzzy living on the newly created riverside space will confirm these preliminary superlatives

“Can you think of a space of this quality and mix in Dublin or even London?” asks Niall Scott of SCT quite rhetorically, as the project fast-forwards to its April 6 official opening.

Niall Scott recalls, with a wry appreciation, how local market commentators all told Howard Holdings CEO Greg Coughlan that a hotel wouldn’t work on this site; that it was wrong for offices, and that rent expectations were too high. A 192-bed hotel, fully allotted office block, two basement levels of car parking (and with a swimming pool beneath river level for good measure) as well as all of the outdoor space/plaza/boardwalk and more all done to an unstinting standard is a nice riposte. Getting headline office rents from the relocating Irish Examiner is a nice bonus too, no doubt.

In the past few months, the visual aspect towards City Quarter has evolved rapidly. Now there’ll be a reversal: with the boardwalk up and running, there’s a sense of real, newly-minted space and a view from it too, and on all levels that view contains intimations of a city looking optimistically to its future.

Captivating, too, are the views from the upper floors of the buildings, particularly from the top of the 60,000 sq ft six storey office building. Here, you’re seemingly on a height par with the terraces of houses heading up to St Luke’s Cross, City Hall is beneath you, and the river’s two channels meet just to the east, with ships an active commercial feature and the city’s church spires to the west, south and north.

Then, there’s all that docklands land left to come, with Halls silos setting height markers and beckoning development to “come on in, the water is fine.”

And, this is the spot to bring Taoiseach Bertie Ahern up to on April 6, and to impress on him what could be delivered on CIE’s scandalously moribund rail station on Horgan’s Quay, and to signal to him how important Cork’s docklands could be on the national and international stage with appropriate support, decentralisation/anchor user or incentives.