The Burlington Hotel is the latest Dublin landmark to be bought by developers, and with pubs, shops and service stations also being sold off, is the capital's social fabric being lost, asks Rosita Boland
At the end of this month, the Burlington Hotel will be sold. It's estimated that the 3.8-acre parcel of land, described as the most important and expensive site that will come on the Dublin market in 2007, will fetch more than €300 million. Once the nearby Berkeley Court and the sprawling Ballsbridge Jury's were sold last year, it was virtually inevitable that the Burlington would also be put up for sale.
Who'd have thought that the Burlo, an honest-to-God, unpretentious, rather ugly duckling we took for granted for so long, where countless post-match parties, conferences, Christmas parties, weddings and those mysterious events known as "functions" were held, and in whose car park legions of tour buses herded in the summer, was actually an immensely valuable swan all along?
This week, Pat Gunne of Richard Ellis, who is handling the sale, described it as a "blank canvas of 3.8 acres in what is clearly Dublin's most exclusive area". The area may indeed be a clean slate to whichever property developer buys the site. But for many years, for ordinary punters, the value of the space lay in the place the Burlington occupied in the collective memory of the many people from all over Ireland who used it for business and pleasure, rather than in the ever-increasing value of its square footage.
IT'S IN THE nature of cities to change and regenerate themselves. Every generation makes and remakes its own map of the city. Shops and restaurants open and close, areas go in and out of fashion; the cities themselves are sometimes popular destinations with tourists and sometimes not. But, at some point, city dwellers have always found enduring anchors in their transient spaces - hotels, pubs, corner shops, local service stations.
It is envisaged that both the Berkeley Court and Jury's Ballsbridge will close in August, after the Horse Show. Sean Dunne paid €380 million for them last year, and is currently finalising his plans for the sites, where he proposes to build a 32-storey tower, along with a number of 12-storey buildings.
Last month, the owners of the Superquinn chain, Select Retail Holdings, agreed to buy the Montrose Hotel on the Stillorgan Road for €40 million, an acquisition widely believed to be for development purposes.
The Jurys Doyle Tara Hotel on Merrion Road, which was sold to Radora Developments for €14.2 million, was recently refused planning permission for a 25-storey tower, incorporating a 156-room hotel and 82 residential units on the site of the old hotel. Radora is appealing the decision. Ubiquitous property developer Bernard McNamara has a stake in both Select Retail Holdings and Radora Developments.
In the last 18 months, Shell, Texaco, Esso and Maxol have sold service stations around Dublin, all of them bought for commercial or residential development. Gone is the Shell station on the Rock Road, and the Texaco on the same road. Shell stations in Stillorgan, Clonskeagh and Churchtown have also been sold. Up for sale this month is the Esso station on Sandford Road, Ranelagh, with the half-acre site expected to make over €12.5 million. If you're a Dubliner, the chances are that your local service station, wherever it is, is now a lot less local than it was a year ago.
Newsagents and corner shops, such as Keighron Newsagents in Ranelagh, the Village Stores in Sandymount, and McCabes Deli in Ballsbridge, have all been sold for development in the last 18 months.
Large landmark pubs in the more affluent suburbs, many of which have big footprints due to their car parking areas, are also beginning to disappear.
The Dollymount House in Clontarf was sold for €15 million to developer Sean McKeon - the highest price paid for a pub in the city last year; a quarter of all Dublin pub sales in 2006 were for development purposes. This year already, the Addison Lodge in Glasnevin, a site on a little more than an acre, was jointly bought for €16 million by developer Joe Kenny and publican Kevin Fitzsimons. Last month, it was announced that Andrews Lane Theatre, the modest performance space in Dublin's city centre, is to be sold, with a guide price of more than €7.5 million.
WHEN NEWS BROKE about the forthcoming sale of the Burlington, and given the current lack of clarity about the proposed National Conference Centre, Dublin Chamber of Commerce wrote to the Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, stating that it was "concerned about the negative impact the sale of the Burlington Hotel will have on both business in the city, and on the wider tourism industry".
It pointed out that with the additional loss of the Berkeley Court and Jury's Ballsbridge, "Dublin-based businesses and conference organisers were concerned with the lack of venues suitable to host conferences and events for capacities in excess of 350 persons".
During the recession of the 1980s, the big property debate in central Dublin was whether the Temple Bar area should be levelled to make way for a new national bus terminal. It could be argued that what really saved Temple Bar from becoming a big parking space was not the vision, whims or tenacity of certain politicians and focus groups of the day, but the simple fact that the value of Dublin real estate was so low at the time. There wasn't much to lose by having an imaginative plan, as opposed to a drearily functional one, but there was political and image kudos to be won.
The development of Temple Bar as a cultural centre is widely regarded as one of Charlie Haughey's more positive legacies. Despite the accompanying excesses, it can't be denied that the right decision was made to transform it into a social, communal space, used by both locals and visitors. It's unlikely, 20 years on, such altruism would be the first instinct of developers, with so much profit to be made from building yet more private-sector residential units.
"It's important not to allow short-term land-use pressure to overwhelm the need to maintain established use for land in and around urban centres," states Ian Lumley, the heritage officer with An Taisce. "This is of particular concern in a hotel such as the Burlington. The Burlington isn't itself architecturally important, but it's embedded in the social fabric of the city." And, he points out, this is not just an issue for residents of the capital. "What becomes a trend in Dublin then tends to start happening elsewhere, because that's the nature of trends."
The social fabric of Dublin city is beginning to change irreversibly. We view hotels, in particular those close to the city centre such as the Burlington, as being a bit like urban mountains: objects which tend not to move once they appear. They're part of the day-to-day texture of the city, in the same way as pubs, service stations and convenience stores. But, gradually, these useful spaces are being pushed out of the city. Like is not being replaced with like, and it leaves us lurching towards a depersonalised urban space.