Elverys will ‘bring life and vitality’ back to Cork's Patrick Street

The “best ever sports store, befitting a sports-mad city like Cork” is what Intersport Elverys director and co-owner John Staunton has promised as he outlined the plans for the new store to be located on the former site of Roches Stores on Patrick Street.

Speaking to The Echo, Mr Staunton said that the new store would comprise 40,000sq ft of retail space on two floors, and said interest was also being shown in other units within the building.

He outlined how the main store, the Elverys section, would be laid out.

“The first floor will be spectacular,” he said. “It will be full of authentic sport, all your active sports, your rugby, your soccer, your GAA, all the enthusiasts, that’s the floor I’d like to be on.

“I’d love to be open by year-end if we get a fair wind behind us. They’re not spectacular changes, we’re only upgrading the front facade and creating a subdivision of the units, so we’re not altering the facade — planning is planning, we’re in the lap of the gods.”

In an effort to give an account of the scale of the project the company has taken on, Mr Staunton described the building before Intersport Elverys bought it as “like something from a science fiction movie” with “water trickling down in the background and there’s lights flickering on and off”.

Despite all this, Mr Staunton said the company decided to purchase the building because it was conscious it needed a home.

“Patrick Street has to be one of the great streets of Europe,” he said.

“You don’t just get a street that swivels as spectacularly as that towards the River Lee.”

He said some progress had been made on the building since the time they first saw it. “Now it’s clean and safe, then we had to figure out what to do with it, because the holding is nearly two acres, which you don’t see anymore,” he said.

“It doesn’t work well as an entire 160,000sq ft building,” he said. “That type of building isn’t doing well globally, the likes of Macy’s and Sears.

“We think a varied use across the front is best, not just a single use. So we’re planning to subdivide the front and we’ve also put in for planning to infill a small piece of the atrium, which will bring you up closer into the sky, because that’s a spectacular atrium,” he said.

According to reports, it cost €12m to purchase the building, but the work to make it safe since and to complete what has being planned will take another sizable chunk of finance.

“It runs into multi-million euros, because the trouble is you think, well, it’s only a bit of plaster board, but it ends up being 10,000sq ft of plaster board, so everything gets multiplied.”

Mr Staunton said the emphasis was now on accelerating as much as possible the process to transform the building from being the “blight of Patrick Street” and get it open.

“That will bring life and vitality back to the street,” he said.

Mr Staunton acknowledged the ongoing narrative around the city centre focusing on derelict buildings and concerns about increasing criminality, but pointed out that this was part of a global trend.

“Absolutely, and this has happened in cities around the world, where they’ve deteriorated as a result of non-activity,” he said.

“So the sooner it’s occupied and becomes part of the fabric of the city again, the better — it doesn’t help that it’s kind of vacant,” said Mr Staunton. “Structurally, it’s in very good condition. It was built in 1927, it’s a big task, and it’s going to take a multi-million-euro investment, but we’ve got great support from the people of Cork, Cork city and county, during covid.

“We’d like a home which is a flagship store, it will be the best store we’ll ever do in Ireland for sure.”

Mr Staunton described the response from Cork City Council to the plan as an “incredibly generous reception”.

“I think they’re more anxious than we are to do something about it”, he said, adding that they were coming under pressure from the authority “to get on with this”.

“They’ve been pressing us for plans, but in a helpful manner,” he said. “Look, they couldn’t do a lot until they get a plan, so we will find out if there are issues they are concerned about during the planning process.”

The planning application was lodged with the council this week, and Mr Staunton said the council would need a “few days’ grace” to upload what he described as a huge file.

He acknowledged, however, that Elverys were located in retail parks — the company has 46 stores nationwide — on the outskirts of towns all over the country, and that the move to locate in Cork city centre’s main thoroughfare was going against the flow, in a way.

He pointed to instances, such as their store in Bridge St of Tralee, where the company had been lauded for its restoration of a store there that had been vacant for 15 years previously, as an example of the company’s track record.

“We would see both sides of the coin, city centres are far from dead, but you can’t find the box size that big brands need in the town centres or small city centres.

“Patrick Street isn’t like that, there’s a wonderful array, you have Penneys going to invest spectacularly, you have Brown Thomas, you’ve all the major brands on Opera Lane in decent box sizes. So it’s a wonderful shopping precinct and that’s why we’ve been convinced to keep going.

While there is an Elverys branch on Oliver Plunkett St, those staff will move to the new outlet when it opens, and the brand name has a long history in Cork.

“Elverys had a shop at 78 Patrick Street as far back as 1935.”

It had stores in Dublin and London at the same time.

“Elverys are the oldest sports store in Ireland, it’s there since 1847, we only bought it in the 90s,” he said.

He did a deeper dive into the history of the name and found that a lady called Beatrice Elvery did the illustrations for the book of short stories by Pádraic Mac Piarais, Íosagán agus scéalta eile.

“There’s a history going back there of Elverys being associated with the foundation of the State.”

A new chapter in that long history is set to open to sports-mad Corkonians in the coming months.