Derelict Paintwell site finally ‘primed’ for redevelopment in Cork City Council-driven €275k sale

Glossy future beckons for long-vacant former paint and decorating shop and derelict site

Wed, 23 Mar, 2022 - 17:30

Property Editor Tommy Barker reports

A SITE acquired under the Derelict Sites Act by Cork City Council, in a historic city quarter and with links going back to Spanish Armada times, is being sold for long-awaited redevelopment.

It’s one of almost 100 derelict properties on the local authority’s register, and its offer for sale after a 10-year hiatus lying idle will be widely welcomed — and seen as an outlier for other key sites to be made available for new uses.

Christmas week at the Coal Quay (Cornmarket Street) Cork in 1933

Gone to market this week for the local authority is a property/site at 43-45 Cornmarket St, or the Coal Quay, adjoining the Bodega/Old Town Whiskey Bar heritage pub, and facing the Rising Sons Brewery and Cornmarket Centre, home to a Lidl and TKMaxx with overhead quality apartments, and close to the Cornstore bar and restaurant, among other retailers and occupiers.

It’s in one of the city’s most historic quarters, with a number of vacant buildings finally being moved on by Cork City Hall, including four, Nos 62-65, in very poor order 100m away on North Main St, where An Bord Pleanála approved a CPO by City Hall, along with CPOs on two others on Barrack Street.

Now on the Derelict Sites Register and subject to a CPO: Nos .

The Cornmarket St property now up for new uses is being offered by auctioneers Casey & Kingston, for the Estates Office of Cork City Council, with a €275,000 AMV. It is being disposed of via ‘Best and Final Bids’ process in a month’s time, on April 21.

The same agents also had it on the open market back in 2011, when it had carried an €800,000 price hope but no action followed.

It had been a paint and decorating shop premises, Paintwell, for the previous 24 years and business ceased when the owner retired.

The slender building, and site, is at the corner of Portney’s Lane, a very narrow pedestrian walkway linking the Coal Quay to North Main St, one of the few surviving medieval laneways in the area where some large-scale student apartment construction is ongoing.

A private home on the lane, No 18 with rear garden, sold in the past year for €292,000, according to the Price Register. Also on the lane is a site derelict since the 1990s, some of it used for surface-level car parking, and another section found a temporary use as a community garden.

This Paintwell site appears primed for a mixed use development of commercial/retail at ground floor with overhead residential accommodation, possibly suiting the rental market, or a housing association or some other development mix.

Right now, there’s a three-storey retail premises of 2,500 sq ft with 1,500 sq ft at ground, on a total infill site of 0.066 acres.

The zoning is ‘City Centre Retail’, and Casey & Kingston selling agents Sam Kingston and Declan Hickey say there’s now good and marketable title on the property.

Anchor tenant? Days of the Spanish Armada and 1601 Battle of Kinsale recalled at Cornmarket Street site. Pic Denis Scannell

Notably, the building (which is not a protected structure) has a heritage plaque on its front wall recalling how the leader of the Spanish forces at the Battle of Kinsale, Don Juan De Aquila, laid low on Portney’s Lane for months after the 1601 battle. The lane had enjoyed what was euphemistically titled “a colourful and bawdy reputation,” of the bordello and red light variety, in earlier centuries while, in contrast to another plaque on the former Paintwell building in the early 2000s, noted the fact a weekly rosary was held at the same spot.

Adjacent properties such as the Bodega and Loft Furniture store are in 19th century limestone buildings, once covered markets, part of a centuries’ long lineage of sales of goods in all its forms on the street, which also hosts weekend food and farmers’ market.