Windmill Lane, the creative centre of U2's early music, has long been a disappointment to the band's fans, who might have imagined glamour and glitz but instead found themselves in a grey, graffitied and uninspiring part of Dublin city.
But all that is about to change as the area in the South Dublin docklands has undergone a facelift and is now being heralded as the city's newest creative and industrial quarter.
Hibernia REIT engaged Roughan & O'Donovan to design public realm enhancement works to transform Windmill Lane into a 'welcoming, tree-lined social space linking a quartet of business headquarters.'
Working closely with Dublin City Council, Roughan & O'Donovan devised a scheme to create an attractive but functional public realm. Their redesign draws heavily on the principles of urban streetscape design and includes:
- Enhanced granite footpaths
- Traffic calming
- Improved pedestrian facilities
- Tree planting
- Public lighting
- Attractive new street furniture
Thousands of antique granite cobbles, found buried under more recent tarmac layers, were rehabilitated and then reset on a new road foundation to form the new road surface. A bespoke bedding system for the cobbles was then devised with Dublin City Council’s road maintenance department to ensure the street was both comfortably passable and visually attractive.
In commenting on the project, Roughan & O'Donovan's Eoin Ó'Catháin, said:
We are pleased to see Windmill Lane transformed into an area ripe for starspotting once again.
