In a town where the boat should take precedence over all other modes of transport, the car has been allowed first place. The dominant physical feature of Athlone is the Shannon, which runs through its centre. The river provided the initial reason for the town's creation from the 10th century onwards, linking the east to the west of the country. But Athlone is by no means the only Irish urban development which has traditionally chosen to ignore rather than celebrate its waterway. So it is hardly unusual that so many older properties in the town show only their backs to the Shannon. Despite the recent extension of the town's marina, it is the road rather than the river which is celebrated in Athlone, and this fact explains why cars are held in such high regard. Everywhere the visitor turns, surface parking facilities are to be found. A potentially charming site, St Mary's Square, in front of the old Roman Catholic church and national school, is devoted to cars. So too are large parts of the riverside strand, as well as ample sections of the Ballymahon road and Northgate Street. Athlone is so anxious to welcome drivers and so fearful of losing their commercial custom that the concerns of the car appear to have overridden all others. According to the town clerk, John Walsh, Athlone's long-standing status as the retail centre of the midlands suffered badly during the 1980s and early 1990s when other places, such as Tullamore and Mullingar, began to make themselves more attractive to shoppers. Limited public transport means that the great majority of visitors to Athlone will travel by car and need to be assured of reliable parking if they are to make the trip regularly. Hence the local authority's provision of an abundance of parking sites throughout the town. However, the concern with cars has been to the detriment of the town in recent years, a situation from which Athlone - not over endowed with examples of fine architecture - may find it difficult to recover. There are only a handful of distinguished old buildings to be found, the most notable being Athlone Castle, a property showing few signs of its 13thcentury origins because of successive waves of assault and neglect.
But the castle is a handsome sight on the west bank of the Shannon, and it occupies a somewhat cramped position with more grace than does the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, which it faces. The latter, a blend of the baroque and neo-classical dating from the mid-1930s, entertains cathedral aspirations on a site barely large enough to contain an average parish church. On the east side of the river, facing the castle, there used to stand what could have been promoted as an icon of modernist architecture in Ireland: the Ritz cinema. Designed by Michael Scott in 1938 and 1939, it boasted free-standing figurative paintings by Louis Le Brocquy in the auditorium. Sadly, this was neglected even during the architect's lifetime, and abandoned after his death. Formerly owned by Westmeath County Council, the site has now been cleared and is being privately redeveloped as an apartment building with restaurants and retail outlets. Elsewhere on the east side, the most appealing feature of the town is its streetscape, a remnant of the old medieval settlement as one road or laneway narrowly twists itself around the next. These are streets best suited to the pedestrian, even if, for much of the time, they are dominated by cars. Along the old roads, such as Strand Street and Court Devenish, there are a few 18th-century houses, albeit much altered, as well as St Mary's, which belongs to the Church of Ireland and offers a 17th-century belltower attached to a rather charming early 19th-century exercise in neo-Gothic. These buildings, however, remain as isolated memories of Athlone's past and do not represent contemporary aspirations. For a sense of the town's present character, it is necessary to visit Golden Island. Despite the beach-like resonances of its name, this is actually a 160,000 square-foot shopping centre, developed at a cost of more than £25 million in the middle of the last decade, thanks to the advantages offered by an urban renewal scheme. Golden Island was intended to rescue Athlone from the economic doldrums into which the town had unquestionably slid by the 1990s, and to resurrect the place as an important shopping destination for the midlands. The town's urban district council, both at the time of the centre's development and since, have keenly supported the project. Walsh, for example, argues that its presence has been of critical importance in the local economic revival, and that everyone in the area has benefited from Golden Island. That the constantly-thronged shopping centre has achieved its purpose and brought shoppers back to Athlone cannot be doubted - but at what cost? In terms of appearance, the centre has no merits, with its semi-circular entrance, bedecked with an array of ill-conceived post-modern ornamentation, unsuccessfully attempting to glorify the ordinary. The interior is entirely undistinguished, while away from the main doors the rest of the pebbledashed exterior is almost insulting in its unwillingness to make even a token effort at decoration. And the sheer scale of the development makes it unavoidable - at least the town's older, and still operational, shopping centre off nearby Sean Costello Street manages to tuck itself tidily into the surrounding environment. But brashness is by no means the worst feature of Golden Island. It stands surrounded by no fewer than 1,000 surface car-parking spaces, through which riverdriven winds blow relentlessly. Then there are the developments which continue to rise up in the vicinity: three- and four-storey blocks of apartments devoid of any design interest, their plain facades relieved only by window surrounds crudely executed in cement and the occasional row of thin metal balconies. The ground floors of these buildings sport a standardised style of "traditional" shopfronts bearing no relation to either the rest of the structure or the business transacted within, therefore serving only to highlight the visual poverty of the entire development. However, there are other reasons to condemn Golden Island, the most important of which is the impact it has so obviously had on the rest of the town. To reach those 1,000 car-parking spaces, drivers must traverse the ill-suited and narrow surrounding streets, bringing back the constant congestion which was supposed to have been banished when Athlone's bypass was opened a decade ago. And all those cars pouring through the town's densely-packed centre have to go by premises which once housed thriving retail businesses but are now closed and neglected.
GOLDEN Island may be a mass of activity, but many of the shops around Church and Mardyke streets show little evidence of benefiting from the centre's success; several key sites are now vacant and many properties in need of refurbishment. Walsh, while accepting that some long-established retailers either closed down or transferred their businesses to Golden Island, insists the older parts of the town are now starting to recover. But the impact of the new centre seems also to have affected the west bank of the town, an area which traditionally attracted shoppers but now holds mostly bars and restaurants. Again the beneficiary of an urban renewal scheme in the mid1990s, the west side has at least retained its old grid pattern of streets meandering around the castle. Where new elements have been introduced, such as the award-winning St Peter's Port, these have followed the design of existing street patterns. But even here the detrimental effects of Golden Island cannot be overlooked: a new development, created as a result of the 1994 urban renewal scheme and taking up much of the south side of Pearse Street, contains 13 retail units - all of which are still vacant. And for all the fake traditional shop fronts springing up around the town, there remain genuine examples of the form - for instance, Connaught Street's Shamrock Bar with its original wooden shutters still intact, although barely. But these are suffering neglect because they lie outside any urban renewal scheme area. Even without such schemes, Athlone is currently undergoing a boom. Its strategic position in the centre of the country has once more brought the town back into favour. Last January, in a document called "Visions of Ireland", the Labour Party proposed that Athlone be developed as a new "polycentric city" for the midlands, with good public transport services linking it to other urban settlements undergoing growth such as Clara, Moate and Ballinasloe. This is an aspiration which meets with the approval of local people. At the moment, the town's speedy development is taking place in response to immediate requirements, not just from local retailers but also Athlone's expanding institute of technology and workers drawn to the midlands by industries in the region. Typical of the changes taking place in the centre of Athlone is a very substantial hotel and apartment development called Silverquay on the site of a former factory. Situated on the riverfront immediately to the northeast of Athlone's bridge, Silverquay rises six storeys and, in both height and bulk, dwarfs everything else in the vicinity, such as the delightful two-storey Abbey House, standing in its own adjacent grounds, and the mid 19th-century Allied Irish Bank, a limestone building in Italianate palazzo style. In addition, the design of Silverquay displays the same indifference to local tradition as do similar developments around Golden Island; steeply-pitched roofs and metal balconies are the only elements introduced to break up the routine of the facades, but these are simply not forceful enough to accomplish their task. Demand for housing in Athlone is likely to increase in the future, resulting in ill-considered schemes, such as one now completed on the Dublin road - two five-storey apartment blocks called Ardri incongruously located behind a petrol station and next to a set of oil storage tanks. If the town is to increase its meagre stock of good architecture, it needs to give greater consideration to two areas: context and cars. With regard to context, a lot of new buildings currently under construction around Athlone show no evidence of understanding their immediate environment and attempt to cram as much square footage onto the site as is logistically possible. And the same problem is apparent in the town's understandable but dangerous desire to satisfy the demands of car-driving shoppers. By pandering to the latter, Athlone's fabric has suffered dreadful, but not yet irreparable damage. What happens over the next few years will be of critical importance to the town's long-term future.