Crosbie's dockland village gets to the Point

Developer's €850m Point Village project aims to attract more people to docklands and boost live music scene, writes Simon Carswell, Finance Correspondent

Harry Crosbie has worked in the Dublin docklands since he was 17, has lived in the area for more than 20 years and is investing €850 million in redeveloping the 12 acres around the Point Depot music venue.

It's fair to say the Dublin property developer is a great believer in the area. He says that people thought he was mad when he moved into a then derelict quarter, but he liked how quiet it was at the weekend.

The area has been transformed since then. The IFSC has expanded out to the Spencer Dock development on the north quays in which Crosbie holds a one-third stake. The land around the Point Depot, also owned by Crosbie, is the next large piece of development land on the north quays after Spencer Dock.

Crosbie is turning this site into a village of shops, homes, offices, restaurants and cafes. He has signed up Dunnes Stores to be the anchor tenant in the development with a 150,000sq ft store, the retailer's biggest outlet in Ireland, according to Crosbie.

He believes that he can tap into a catchment area of 65,000 people and says that the Point Village will be in the middle of the "coastal wealth belt" which runs from Clontarf to Sandymount.

"As the city was developing, it just became obvious that people were prepared to come down to the docks," he says.

"The centre of gravity of the city is moving down river and east. The more attractions in the area to increase the footfall, the stronger it is going to make it."

To that end, Crosbie is almost doubling the size of the Point Depot venue into a 15,000-seat arena, opening this time next year.

Next to that, he plans to build another Vicar Street, the venue he owns near the Liberties in the city centre.

He is also building a Daniel Liebeskind-designed 2,000-seat theatre on Grand Canal Square next to his home in the south docklands.

This will give him four music venues.

Crosbie has signed up London-based celebrity chef Marco Pierre White to open a 300-seat brasserie in the Point Village called Hell's Kitchen after the recent reality TV show that featured the chef.

Crosbie erected a billboard notice next to the Point Depot featuring a picture of White next to the line: "'Ireland, I will feed you,' says smouldering kitchen god."

Another element of Crosbie's vision is a 39-storey building called the Watchtower, which he hopes will stand across the river from the proposed U2 tower on the southside of the Liffey.

Crosbie wants to build a media studio at the top of his tower from where television and radio companies can broadcast programmes. He intends to have a bar, restaurant and viewing tower at the top of the tower serviced by glass lifts running up the side of the building.

"From the top, on a clear morning, you will be able to see Wales," he says.

Crosbie doesn't think that Dublin Port will - as has been proposed - be moved out of the city. He believes that the port can co-exist with the massive development that is expected in the area.

"I don't see that as being practical, certainly in our lifetimes, because I just think that the infrastructural requirements are so huge," he says.

"If you study what is happening in Europe, there is no reason for ports to be on the coast at all any more because they can land containers on a train and run the train in the middle of the night to wherever the nearest conglomeration of motorways is and that is where the port is.

"It is the inland port concept. There is no need for it to be anywhere near a port. Dublin Port can easily change itself to suit the modern way of doing that and you could have a corridor to an inland port quite easily. That is the way the future will go rather than the port shutting down."

Crosbie says that he saw people moving into dockland areas in German, Dutch and Baltic coastal cities 20 to 25 years ago and felt that it was inevitable that something similar would happen in Dublin.

"They will still be able to get the development capacity of the land and not have to move and recreate all that massively expensive infrastructure elsewhere," he says.

Crosbie also believes that there is development value in the 33 acres at the port held by ferry group ICG, which has sparked the frenetic takeover interest in the company.

"In time, this land will have a hope value for development, but how long that is going to be is impossible to foresee because the rate of change is so rapid. Anybody looking more than three years down the line is only guessing," he says.

Crosbie also sees huge development value in the music venues he is building, but only with an international concert promoter managing them. This is why he is signing over the management of the four venues to the US entertainment giant Live Nation. Its manager in Dublin, Mike Adamson, will run them.

"The quality of the new Point is going to give a lot of the weaker outdoor products [ concerts] a run for their money. The public are becoming much more discriminating," he says.

"Standing in wet, soggy fields with smelly toilets may be coming to the end of its life. When people see the quality of this new arena, I think we will take back some of that business."

Crosbie says the live music scene is growing at the expense of the music recording industry, which cannot control how people are buying music.

He cited the example of English band Radiohead, which this week allowed fans to set the price for its new album by buying it online. "The multiplicity of delivery platforms is confusing the market. It is too hard to control it. The stuff was too dear anyway and technology has beaten up its own product," he says.

"The essence is that you cannot replicate live entertainment and the money will go back to the real talent, to the people who can really perform. It is showbiz as it really was."