How Waterford plundered its rich past for a more prosperous future

Marjorie Brennan speaks to RIAI Gandon Medal-winning architect Rupert Maddock who has been at the heart of Waterford City’s revival

The Vikings are gone, but not forgotten: Greyfriars church

Waterford is having a moment. Ireland’s oldest city was the only Irish destination featured on The New York Times 52 Places to Go list for this year and it has also been selected as the European City of Christmas for 2024. The jewel in the city’s crown is the Viking Triangle which showcases the city’s notable history in a beautifully restored and compact area, and also features an outstanding portfolio of museums.

Apple of city's eye: the Apple Market

However, the city’s transformation didn’t occur overnight. At the turn of the millennium, it was in rough shape, with much of the city’s architectural heritage neglected and decaying. The regeneration was kickstarted in 2000 with the creation of the central plaza at John Roberts Square, named after the Waterford architect who designed both the Catholic and Protestant cathedrals in the city. In tandem with this came the William Vincent Wallace Plaza, creating an outdoor entertainment space on the city’s quayside.

John Roberts Square after reconfiguration c 2000

 In 2010, a former ESB building on the Mall, within the Viking Triangle, was repurposed to house a new Waterford Crystal visitor experience, keeping the iconic brand alive in the city after the closure of the factory.

Medieval Museum

In 2013 a stunning new Medieval Museum, designed in-house by the city council, was officially opened, going on to garner a host of awards.

Instrumental in all these pioneering initiatives, and many more, was recently retired city architect Rupert Maddock. In recognition of his many achievements, last November he was awarded the prestigious Gandon Medal by the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the first architect working in the public service to receive the honour.

Architect Rupert Maddock of Waterford City and County Council was awarded the RIAI Gandon Medal for lifetime achievement in Architecture. Picture: Conor Healy/Picture It Photography

When Maddock joined Waterford City Council in 1997, he saw the many possibilities for improvement.

“The city centre was not attractive then, there were lots of issues but there was also great potential, and this excited me. The historic core of the city, what became the Viking Triangle, was not in great shape. A lot of the buildings, particularly on the Quays, had seen no investment for nearly 100 years and were in very parlous condition. There was a lot of vacancy. Cathedral Square was pitiful, just boarded up, even though it had some of the most important urban civic buildings in the country — Christchurch Cathedral, City Hall, the Theatre Royal. There wasn’t much going on there and it had buildings that represented nearly 1,000 years of Irish civic architecture,” he says.

A culturally-led regeneration project was put in train with the city’s streets, buildings and public realm at its centre. Maddock worked closely with Eamonn McEneaney, former director of Waterford Museum of Treasures, who came up with the designation of Viking Triangle.

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“We looked at historic artefacts, the city wall and the cultural history and how it could all be kneaded together to create a new narrative that would give a coherent logic to the area. The idea originally was that the museums would be arranged in chronological order: from Reginald’s Tower, which is obviously Viking; the Medieval Museum, which reflects the medieval history of the city; and the Bishop’s Palace, with 18th century to modern, and they were strung out along the medieval town wall which passes through all of the buildings. It was like beads on a necklace,” says Maddock.

McEneaney would later spearhead the addition of other museums including the Irish Museum of Time and the Irish Silver Museum and most recently, his farewell project, the Museum of the Irish Wake.

At the heart of Maddock’s work is a redirection of the public realm towards the needs of Waterford’s citizens. He has overseen the transformation of the retail spine of the city centre into an area where the pedestrian is given priority. This project has proved to be a far-sighted one.

“When we started to engage with large-scale public realm works in the city centre in 2000, with John Roberts Square, we wanted to clear the clutter, reduce the number of vehicles in the city centre, making it more suitable for pedestrians and active travel modes of transport and mobility, allowing shops and buildings to spill out onto public spaces. We didn’t realise that 20 years later, Covid would come along, and the city was very easily able to allow for outdoor dining and colonising the outdoor space. And actually that is the way the world is going now.”

This approach has also allowed Waterford to put on annual large-scale public events and festivals that draw visitors from all over Ireland and beyond.

Michael Street

“If you want to put on a large event like the Harvest Festival, Spraoi or Winterval, it’s a completely different type of use of space than accommodating cars and vehicles — with thousands of people moving around the city.”

While there are still improvements to be made in Waterford, including an overhaul of the South Quays, there is no arguing with the success of its approach. According to Maddock, key to the transformation of the city is understanding its cultural and historical DNA.

Public realm proposal for Waterford's South Quays

“There’s a lot of frameworks, plans, guidelines and strategies out there but you also need vision and creativity, you need to be able to read what makes any particular place special and unique, to get beneath the skin of a place and try and understand it. Artists, for instance, are very important. Because they think outside the box, they can come up with different ways of looking at space or expressing things. If you look at the Medieval Museum, there was an artist embedded in the design team, and that’s why the facade is so successful,” he says.

Waterford's Bishop's Palace

Before he went to work for Waterford City Council, Maddock did a stint in Cork under former city architect Neil Hegarty. Is there anything Cork could learn from its neighbour?

“Far be it for me to give Cork any advice,” he laughs. “But you need to have a flexible vision that somehow incorporates a very good understanding of why and how the city has developed the way it has. Cork is 1,000 years old, so most of the history of the city is not the way we perceive the city now, it takes a little lateral thinking. It has been dominated by cars and vehicles only for the last 60 or 70 years. You can look up photographs from Cork from 100/120 years ago — that’s almost what you want the city to go back to, the way the streets had a wide variety of uses, people selling fruit and vegetables, with all sorts of public events happening. Cities were lively places, with multiple uses.”

Maddock says that ultimately, we need to make our cities attractive places to be and live.

Bishop's Palace Garden

“Our Urban Regeneration and Development Fund (URDF) application from 2020 was based around the concept of ‘live, work and play’. That’s another key to it, the city has to be of good enough environmental quality that a cross-section of people will want to live there, with parks, green areas and places for people to play. My wife is from Greece and the place we go to every summer, the bones of it is still there; it is a classical Greek town from 500/400 BC. They had it all worked out then, the baker, the candlestick maker, the town hall, the port, the temples. Every week something was happening but the richness of life was all encapsulated in the urban area. It was to do with multiple activities and people from all different groups and ages mixing together. It’s not rocket science, it’s been around for 2,000 years. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We know what to do.”