The French are coming, and not a moment too soon. Decathlon, the sporting goods retailer founded in Lille, has taken the remaining anchor tenancy in Clerys Quarter, heralding endorphin rushes not seen on O’Connell Street since two balletic seagulls were filmed duelling opposite The Hot Donut.
Wide, historic thoroughfares that have lost their former grandeur are something they know about in France, though the Champs-Élysées, long the source of Parisian laments, is primed for a makeover spurred by this summer’s Olympic Games – it would be nice to think that Euro 2028 might similarly focus minds in Dublin.
News of Decathlon’s foray into the Clerys Building should be welcomed in the meantime as a solid morsel of positivity for a street that could do with one.
To describe it as a vote of confidence perhaps glosses over the negotiating power of Decathlon, which despite wanting to expand beyond its two existing Irish big-box stores had also indicated it would not sprint to pay excessive city centre rents. But this much-needed leasing could easily not have happened at all. For Europa, Clerys Quarter’s principal investor, to call it a “major coup” is not, by the standards of commercial property-speak, wildly over the top.
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For those of us not employed to be sunny side up, yet not keen on declinism either, it is refreshing to think that the advent of Decathlon will be a catalyst for good things happening on the street.
This is the kind of shop where you can get carried away with possibility. I’ve wandered around its Ballymun store and thought, “yes, I could take up archery”. I’ve passed its table-tennis display and considered haranguing random teenagers into giving me a game. I’ve bought wellies there on the driest of days.
[ Clerys revamp moves up a gear with Decathlon dealOpens in new window ]
The retailer talks about “democratising” sport, a line supported by its reasonably priced product range spanning dozens of activities, not just the three you did at school. Decathlon is a sporting emporium that should fit right in on O’Connell Street, doing its bit alongside Swedish clothing chain H&M to thicken the footfall on its eastern side.
A couple of Christmases have come and gone since Clerys Quarter was supposed to become the “vibrant, thriving” landmark destination of its brochure. The latest update is that its phased opening will pick up pace from the spring.
True, the mixed-use scheme’s gestation – prolonged by construction delays and other complications – has dragged on a lot less than, say, Dublin City Council’s cultural quarter project in Parnell Square. But the only unit currently open is Pret A Manger on North Earl Street, which is not ideal. The longer Clerys Quarter stays shuttered, the longer its contribution to the regeneration of the area will remain in doubt. This makes the Decathlon announcement about more than just one shop, just one lease.
That O’Connell Street is not always safe or perceived as safe – which as people choose to stay away can swiftly amount to the same thing – is painful. Whenever the street is branded a tatty failure, my instinct is to defend it. It certainly doesn’t seem instructive to cite lists of the glamorous stars once snapped there, as if their names alone are evidence of how far the place has fallen.
Is it all that confounding that Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, their entourage and Taylor’s monkey once presided over a full floor of the Gresham? These people lived and fought in hotel rooms the world over. Sadly, O’Connell Street is not the only address that will have suffered over time through urban hollowing-out and official neglect.
O’Connell Street nostalgia, for me, is about the prosaic commerce of Eason magazine-buying, the salty joy of McDonald’s chips. I associate the ‘T’ of O’Connell Street and shade-ridden Henry Street with the tweenage independence of unaccompanied trips to town, made with the pre-mobile instruction to go to my uncles’ camera shop next to the Carlton cinema should I mislay my bus fare home.
[ Decathlon Ireland’s Elena Pecos: ‘This environment is our playground. We need it’Opens in new window ]
I loved Clerys, too, and rank the abrupt manner in which the Natrium consortium shut down the department store hours after it acquired it in June 2015 – leaving it to liquidators to inform hundreds of workers that their jobs were gone – as one of the most brutal events to have occurred on O’Connell Street.
Curious about the restoration of the building, I signed up to a tour given by the architects, Henry J Lyons, as part of last October’s Open House festival and found myself inside it for the first time in more than eight years.
It was an odd feeling. The new Europa-led consortium, to which Natrium flipped on its purchase for a large profit in 2018, was not involved in the demise of the old Clerys. And yet as I climbed the red-carpeted central staircase to the space where the tea-rooms used to be – and will be again – I was struck by the sense that something ugly had taken place where I was standing.
No store fit-outs will fully erase that. Still, during the pandemic, when Dublin was drained of life, I used to walk past the property-agent verbs on the construction hoardings – “shop”, “inspire”, “connect”, “entertain”, “mingle”, “explore” – and the words would read not only as aspirational, but deluded. They don’t anymore. Now that Clerys Quarter is closer to opening, it just seems important that it should work.
On that Open House tour, as I positioned myself under the 28m-high glazed atrium, it was like looking up at a spiral to a future the building wasn’t guaranteed to have. It seemed a healthy sign that passers-by on the street outside saw our group in the reception hall and knocked to ask if the place was finally open.