Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre was built in the downbeat 1980s and somehow manages to look sugary and sentimental, like an English pier in 1899. With its interior white railings and arcade, the word chintzy does not even come close.
Outside? It’s either too hard to maintain all the ornamental hanging baskets and white girding, or no one is bothered to. The effect is a huge, grimy, twee building plonked right at the top of Grafton Street, Dublin.
Yet the Save Stephen’s Green Campaign has conjured 24,000 signatures and lodged its appeal with An Coimisiún Pleanála. In late April, DTDL Ltd received planning permission for a €100 million project on the site – which will involve partly demolishing the centre and rebuilding it.
The new design – courtesy of BKD Architects and O’Donnell+Tuomey – will introduce office space, a brick facade and three levels of shops. It may not win any awards – this is not exactly the work of Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid.
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But what an improvement. I don’t want to spend the limited space I have here to just rattle off more criticisms of the extant building, but let us just dwell on it for a short time more: the glass dome is a pointless, unwelcome, bulbous protrusion into the Dublin skyline (itself not much to look at anyway, granted).
Inside is poorly maintained too – grubby floors, retailers born in another decade (Carrolls gifts and souvenirs, Hallmark, Insomnia, United Colors of Benetton), bathrooms unfit for this century. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre conspires, somehow, to be grotty and schmaltzy, grand and crap, at the same time.
There is no good-taste case for its preservation, so I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. The Save Stephen’s Green appeal claims, for example, that the building’s character “is much-loved by Dubliners”, that it is an “iconic landmark building in Dublin”.
A spokesperson for the campaign claims the centre “oozes character”, that it is “instantly recognisable and incredibly unique, and it is extremely unlikely that Dublin city will see another building like it, especially one in such an important focal point of the city centre”. He adds that the atrium “is one of the most impressive structures to experience in Dublin.”
How much of that is true? The building is characterful, sure – though that is often a euphemism for ugly. Hans Christian Andersen – famed for his ugliness – is characterful.
And what does “instantly recognisable” mean? Everything is “instantly recognisable” to those familiar with it. My apartment door is instantly recognisable to me and, it is hoped, totally unrecognisable to you. What is the implication? That even in Burundi or Laos the average punter could pick Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre out of a line-up?
And what of “incredibly unique”? I have a few Victorian seaside towns to introduce you to. The ludicrous hyperbole of “one of the most impressive structures” doesn’t even warrant comment when the National Gallery is around the corner.
Meanwhile, a saccharine defence of the building in another newspaper claimed the loss of the current structure would be “the latest symptom of beige-ification” of Dublin city. One of the great things about Ireland is it has rules and customs around preservation, the piece goes on. So what is happening here? Dublin risks losing all that, er, character at the hands of private equity and in the interest of corporate hotel chains.
It always surprises me how reactionary liberals can be. Until its future was threatened, I had never heard one Dubliner speak of Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre in anything but vaguely uninterested, lightly negative terms.
And now? Apparently it’s the most beloved site in Ireland, famed across the world and synonymous with the Dublin skyline. Maybe civilisations of distant lands talk about the grandeur of the food court. That island of saints and scholars and mock-Victorian shopping centres; the only place in the world to visit an Eason, a travel agent and a Donegal-themed gift shop in one go.
I cannot be the only one to be surprised by the sudden outpouring of love for the place. Mythology usually has some kind of ancient quality to it. But here it all seems rather hastily conjured. And it comes with all those typical small-c words: preserve, protect, character, heritage. These arguments would not look out of place on a campaigning leaflet for a Tory candidate in Henley-on-Thames.
And maybe that is no bad thing. Because the state of the public realm is important. We shouldn’t flood the high streets with homogenous, bricky tedium. Nor should we cling desperately on to ugly, unloved buildings simply because a few Dubliners can’t imagine the cityscape without it; because they cannot believe new to be better than (sort of) old; or because some of you are closet reactionaries and instinctively allergic to change. Twenty-four thousand of you, to be precise.
