Ideas for Blackrock Baths

Nessa Childers and I are holding an ‘Ideas’ meeting for Blackrock Baths on Wednesday 18^th October at 8 pm in the Church Hall on Cross Avenue close to the junction with Mount Merrion Avenue.

Alanis Ltd controlled by the McCormack family and Treasury Holdings apparantly own the Baths and Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council is the tenant.

We’d love to see a Baths back on the site, but nobody’s jumping forward with a wad of cash to make this happen. It's a practical example of the the issues we discussed at our Dublin Bay Futures Conference last April. Ideally many of the Baths around the bay should be restored now that the water quality of the Bay itself is improving because of the new Ringsend Sewage Treatment Works.

The Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Plan says they want to “secure the re-development of Blackrock Baths for tourism and amenity purposes and improve the pedestrian linkages and visual amenity at Blackrock Baths, DART Station, Bath Place Car Park and the Main Street.”

Obviously any ideas for the site should respect the Protected Structures of Idrone Terrace. Clearly Irish Rail is also a key player in all of this. I’d like to see changes to the mess of surface car-parking at Bath Place itself. Shops on the ground floor with apartments overhead and a couple of levels of parking with a courtyard on top might be one way of doing it. Another would be to extend Blackrock Park southwards by widening the measly strip that provides pedestrians with a link to the Park from the Railway Station. Anything is possible if the will is there. The Sutton to Sandycove group also has great ideas for a cycle and pedestrian route around the Bay.

Hope you can make it along.