A more beautiful city: YouTube vision of how Cork could look racks up views
Our beautiful city? How dare you!
It’s the question posed on a YouTube video called by content creator Kev Collins which has racked up more than 38,000 views in the past three weeks.
The film could easily ask “How to make Cork better?” - but, you know, outrage attracts more click-throughs.
Rather than a diatribe against Cork, it is a slick video essay featuring visualisations of what a reimagined Cork with greener public spaces, brighter buildings, and less street clutter could look like. It looks great!
Far from thinking the city is broken, I think Cork is thriving, albeit with plenty of room for improvement.
I see the potential in some of our neglected street corners to elevate the city into a more vibrant and beautiful place to live and visit.
I so regularly bemoan the fact that a good paint job would lift so many Cork streets out of grey mediocrity into shining noteworthiness, I wondered if Kev Collins had been earwigging on some of my kitchen table and pub snug rants.
It’s refreshing to come across a person who shares this vision for an elevated Cork and has the editing skills to put that vision across to a wide audience.
Collins has used computer-generated imagery to show what a park at South Gate Bridge or a new green space on Sullivan’s Quay would look like.
He’s also used his Photoshopping skills to remove a forest of ugly and unnecessary galvanised poles from street corners and transform the palette of beige buildings on Patrick Street into a striking and considered streetscape befitting the heritage of the city.
The practicalities of costs and legalities aside, the new public spaces look amazing.
Some of Kev’s ideas require a big cheque book and a revisit of the city’s development plans - he advocates for more high-rise development in Tivoli to allow for more public spaces with access to the river.
But some of his ideas require little more than a two-person crew, a van, and a few cans of paint. Easy wins for the city would be to tidy up poles, get busy with paint, and protect the old and lovely things we have.
Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. Poles! There are signpost poles everywhere.
Collins identifies a corner of St Patrick’s Bridge and St Patrick’s Quay with a plethora of poles blotting the street view.
In Douglas, there are 35 poles of unfinished galvanised steel sprouting from a new junction holding all manner of instructions and signage. Madness!
Collins argues that by consolidating the poles and painting them black, the streetscape is immediately improved. He calls it “basic urban hygiene”.
His vision of a de-cluttered Patrick Street also extends to replacing the Beth Galli-designed tall lampposts. The lighting was designed to echo the masts of ships, bringing the spirit of Cork’s harbour into the heart of the city, but Collins argues that they are more befitting to the wide seaside boulevards of Barcelona than the narrow streets of Cork. He thinks they should be reused elsewhere in the city and creates a compelling computer-generated picture of what the Grand Parade and Patrick Street would look like without the dominating lampposts.
The Ardú street art project has been a fantastic success at brightening the gable ends of large buildings, but maybe we need to think about reviving the front of some buildings too.
Another idea is to restore Clontarf Bridge to its original battleship red. The Urban Fabric film shows what a sophisticated paint job would do for some of the landmark buildings and structures of Cork.
When you visit a beautiful, well-designed home, it is usually a place that has been created with thought about how the family lives and spends their time. They are houses with nice materials, craftsmanship, and good lighting with the odd family heirloom or vintage piece of furniture thrown in. Lots of the same things apply to a city. Texture, history, patina are what we look for when we travel to other European cities, so why not in Cork?
Collins wants to see old lantern-style lampposts in the city and the old fountains on Emmet Place and at the bottom of Shandon Street restored.
Yes, these things need maintenance, but they add so much to the city, making it a place to linger and enjoy.
It’s an exciting time for Cork city with massive growth and development planned in the coming years and decades. Projects like the transformation of the Marina into a fantastic urban public space show what can be achieved with ambition and vision.
Some easy tweaks here and there, along with enhancing our heritage buildings and investing in the maintenance and upkeep of the nice things we already have will polish our city up nicely and make it shine like the gem it is.
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