LET’S CALL A spade a spade: Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is one of the oddest buildings in Dublin.

The exterior is 1980s-does-Victoriana, while the retail space inside is dated and not being used to its full potential. I’ve lived in the city for well over a decade and I’ve been to its mysterious third floor, er, once.

But what the shopping centre has in its favour is something that’s irreplaceable: character.

Pushback

So when it was confirmed that Dublin City Council had granted planning permission to DTDL Ltd, which is controlled by a fund operated by Davy, to rejuvenate the centre and rebuild major parts of it, there was immediate pushback on social media. 

Why? For starters, the centre’s exterior, with its Victorian conservatory vibes, would be replaced with the personality-free glass panes beloved of 2020s Dublin development. 

When it was under construction in the late 1980s, this shopping centre was a sign of progress. It’s located now where for 10 years the 4-acre Slazenger site sat, an eyesore that badly needed fixing.

The view of the centre from Grafton St.

The shopping centre’s developers wanted to target the growing “young, mobile shopper” market, in particular the “young housewife”, a dwindling demographic in 2023. Times change, and Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre has to change with it.

But does its iconic frontage need to be completely erased in the name of progress?

Plans

The architects have some interesting plans for the shopping centre, mainly hoping to rejuvenate the retail spaces, but also adding office space. It’s promised that it will have a cinema, and that South King Street will be more accessible to people compared to the closed-off shopfronts that are there now.

Naturally, something that was built in the early days of shopping centre life in 1980s Ireland will need an overhaul. Customer needs change, business trends evolve. You’d expect most people to understand that.

But it’s the complete overhaul of the front of the centre that seems egregious. It will mean that when you reach the top of Grafton St, you’ll no longer see Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, sitting like a day-old wedding cake. No more of those layers that feel mysterious yet pretty, and which immediately give the corner character. No more of knowing exactly where you are when you spot those iron curves.  

Proposed development of St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre.

So many times recently I’ve been on the Luas or bus through Dublin city centre and had a moment of feeling lost, unsure of where I am or what I’m looking at. Usually it’s because facing me is a pane of glass on yet another of the glass-fronted developments being erected in the city. 

It has been nice to watch dilapidated parts of the city be revived, and to walk down streets that used to feel empty of life. But there’s an eerie similarity to this ‘new’ Dublin, with all of its hotels, student apartments and office blocks feeling reminiscent of each other in an unsatisfying way.

Interior of the St. Stephen's Green Shopping Centre in Dublin, Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

It’s not that Irish architects are somehow devoid of ideas or don’t care about what they’re doing. It’s just that trends – whether in style, or material, or another factor – surely play a role in what’s being built, and right now they appear to be leading to a very particular style of building being built in Dublin. 

Every era has its own style, and we can’t keep recycling the styles of old. But does everything have to look the same? Do we actually want Dublin to be a sea of glass?

The worst thing is that these approved plans will commit the crime of making the intriguing, slightly bonkers Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre boring. 

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Protected structures

Recently I received a copy of More Than Concrete Blocks: Dublin City’s twentieth-century buildings and their stories, Volume 3 1973-1999 (UCD Press), edited by Ellen Rowley and Carole Pollard. Flicking through, I spotted buildings I love and some I don’t really care for. But what I saw overall was variety and range, and lots of interesting ideas for reinvigorating spaces.

Every building had a story, which could tell an ordinary person like me something about the time in which they were built. They were, in their own ways, a portal to Dublin’s past.

There doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach to developing Dublin. There surely has to be a way of making Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre more useful to businesses and customers, while keeping its sense of character.

The building isn’t a protected structure, but why should that always be the arbiter for allowing massive change? There’s a long enough waiting list to get on the list as it is. 

Not everyone has the same taste, and some think the centre is a monstrosity. Fair enough. But there is beauty in quirks and oddities. After all, character is what makes buildings sing. Even megastar Kendrick Lamar, who as an American must have visited countless malls in his time, found the centre charming enough to film a music video in it.

The oddness of Stephen’s Green is what makes it stand out — the dome, its huge clock, the weird glass kiosks, the feeling of being trapped in an eternally festive conservatory (sometimes literally trapped, as the stairs layout makes no sense). But it has its beauty too, in the grand iron arches and bright flowers that soften its exterior.

There surely must be a way of retaining what makes it special, while also bringing it up to date.

The wrecking ball is a brutal way of nudging the city into the future. 

Aoife Barry is a freelance journalist and author of Social Capital, about Ireland’s relationship with social media.