Pre-Dundrum Town Center?

patrickbrophy18

Just as a matter of interest, what was there before Dundrum Town Center? Was it built on a former housing estate, factory, fields or all three?

YoureATowel

patrickbrophy18 wrote: »

Just as a matter of interest, what was there before Dundrum Town Center? Was it built on a former housing estate, factory, fields or all three?

Check out the OSI mapviewer.

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,717224,727723,6

Under the Preview Map Series options, the default mapping shows the shopping centre as it is today. Ortho 2005 shows the area as the SC was being built. Ortho 2000 will answer your question. It looks like a factory, some small assorted buildings and green areas.

With Ortho 2005 selected move the Overlay slider to 50% so you can compare then and now.

dogmatix

The large building on the southern site was originally H-Williams / Tesco supermarket. On the North end of the site was the old PYE factory which later became the Dundrum bowl. The green area in between held an abandoned and overgrown mill pond.

There where plans in the late 90's and on to turn the green area and mill pond into a small public park but instead we got the town centre. Personally I think the lessor option won out.

Tails142

Yep as someone has said, the area nearest the church where Hamleys is situated used to be a bowling alley and arcade, before it shut down for good it had been turned into a roller blading rink, the place had flooded and the bowling lanes were ruined.

Behind this where the entrance to the main centre now is, i.e the mcdonalds etc used to be the PYE centre and had a few small shops in it, home decoration things like that. Then at the very back where the tesco and RSA offices are used to be a Super Crazy Prices supermarket, this was a little bit like Lidl where there were few shelves, most things were just rolled out on pallets but they were all the normal brands I think.

There was also a place called Wally Rabbits in the PYE centre which was an adventure centre for kids.

If you head to the toilets near Douglas & Kaldi, I think, it may have been other toilets in the centre, but there are a few posters on the wall with more detailed info on what used to be at the site of the old town centre. They make for good reading while you're waiting for someone.

Also at the fountain outside, there is an original wall still there (buried now about 12 foot down) where there used to be some sort of water feature, it was just an old valve with steps leading up to it years ago but I think they have made it part of the fountain, it may have been a reservoir for the PYE factory, not sure.

dogmatix

Tails142 wrote: »

Also at the fountain outside, there is an original wall still there (buried now about 12 foot down) where there used to be some sort of water feature, it was just an old valve with steps leading up to it years ago but I think they have made it part of the fountain, it may have been a reservoir for the PYE factory, not sure.

I think it was originally the mill pond for the Mill, later used for the big laundry operation situated there in the early 20th century. PYE took over later.

A lot of this is covered in Jim Nolans excellent little book on Dundrum history published back in the 1980's (not sure if it is still in print).

slowburner

......ah the memories.



I used to swim in that pond and go shooting in the fields behind!
The pond (still there but half its original size as I recall) was formed by a beautifully landscaped channel with two or three small weirs. The channel was fed from a stream (we always called it a river) which ran from the hills into Balinteer, straight through Dundrum and eventually joined the Dodder at Milltown. It was called the Slang. The river is gone now, from what I could see today - lost in a series of concrete pipes.
The valve used to control water flow to a mill race which was under the Pye factory and may have provided power originally to the Millhouse (still there) when linen was washed there.
You will have to forgive my geography of the layout of the shopping centre, I only know what used to be there.
I don't think it was an ordinary laundry as such, I think it was involved in a specialised final processing of linen. There was a terrace between the Mill house and the pond where the washed linen was laid out to dry - the grass on this terrace was always a different colour to all the other grass.
From the pond a way back to the original course of the river there was a pitch and putt course. And on the other side of the pond feeder there was a very productive garden with one or two greenhouses, heaps of fruit trees and a full time gardener who lived in a lodge at the back gate to the gardens.

The now absent river was a pretty interesting one. The next site up from the millhouse property was Rockfield house probably roughly where the Tesco filling station is now - it was a fine house with walled gardens and tennis courts - owned, I think, by a Dutchman. He had a hydraulic ram powered from the stream but what its purpose was I can't remember.
Then there was the Millhouse diversion which fed into Pye. The pond once held a stock of large trout - these were fed a different diet every day by an amateur angling theorist who wanted to determine what caused differences in trout flesh. That would have been in about the 1920's - maybe earlier. Rumour had it that the trout lived on in the pond until a barrel of oil was tipped in - in reality it was the increase in the number of houses and sewage which killed life in the stream. When I knew it, there was the odd wild trout plenty of sticklebacks and kingfishers.

I don't know how much of the river Slang can be seen at all these days but further down near the Luas bridge at Taney crossroad is a little church. This is St.Naithís church. The Duke of Wellington's baptismal font is supposed to be there. Naithí himself was a hermit who lived there in a wattle hut on the banks of the stream - a bit before my time, maybe 500 AD! The church is built on the original site.
Upstream of the shopping centre is Balally. This translates as Baile Olaf and is thought to be the site of the Viking Olaf's fort - although this has never been proven.

There you go, my potted history of what lies under and either side of Dundrum Shopping centre.
Just shows you all the same how things change - all through history natural features like rivers determine where civilisations spring up, Dundrum wouldn't have existed it if it weren't for the stream. But here they just obliterate the natural features, retail space is more important.

Do I miss these natural and historic features?
Yes, but who cares?

If anyone is interested, there was an industrial archaeological survey done on the area - I gave my copy to someone years ago - but it should be 'Googleable'

muckish

dogmatix wrote: »

The large building on the southern site was originally H-Williams / Tesco supermarket..

And don't forget the Super Crazy Prices days as well!

slowburner

For a while, that building was a sausage factory - Hafner's, I think. I can't remember what it was before H.Williams :pac::pac:

Carpenter

Where were u living slowburner

slowburner

I used to live just up the road from Dundrum Village, as it was then - I'm in deepest Wicklow now. Oddly enough, a lot of people from Dundrum seem to have moved to Wicklow.

Carpenter

slowburner wrote: »

I used to live just up the road from Dundrum Village, as it was then - I'm in deepest Wicklow now. Oddly enough, a lot of people from Dundrum seem to have moved to Wicklow.

In Taney or beside the cop shop

slowburner

Carpenter wrote: »

In Taney or beside the cop shop

Close to 'the tech' - you've gotta be from there - calling it the "cop shop"

muckish

slowburner wrote: »

For a while, that building was a sausage factory - Hafner's, I think. I can't remember what it was before H.Williams :pac::pac:

Was it not Olhausen sausages?
Some of us from the area have moved further afield than wicklow!

slowburner

muckish wrote: »

Was it not Olhausen sausages?
Some of us from the area have moved further afield than wicklow!

I'm pretty sure Hafner's were there originally, I think Olhausen took over afterwards.
And I'm sure some of us have moved even further than Donegal

Is it still called 'the Village' I wonder.

JupiterKid

That's a fascinating history of the site, Slowburner.

For your information, parts of the Slang still exist intact. I lived in Highfield Court apartments in Windy Arbour a few years back and the stream ran right beside our car park.

Out of interest when was the H Williams supermarket built? The 1970s?

slowburner

From memory, that site was oldish in the '70s. I'm not sure if it was built as a supermarket. I have this vague memory of factory bits scattered around the place outside.
Maybe somebody with a better memory (or older:p) will butt in here.

slowburner

Edit: the house mentioned above was not Rockfield - it was Rockmount.

slowburner

What was under Dundrum shopping centre has become relevant with recent flooding. The crosshairs are centred on the mill pond.
http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,717152,727865,7,8

Coles

The Bowler and Quazar! Ah the memories.

Wild Bill

I came up to these parts in the early 1990s and remember with fondness the old windswept Crazy Prices Store based in some former industrial building.

I used to purchase pampers there on an industrial scale!

No trout in a bucolic stream but it had it's own charm.

I think our positive memories are more a reflection on where we were in life than the physical reality.

So many of today's kids will grow up thinking the new Shopping Centre is the Nirvana of their childhood memories!

slowburner

Wild Bill wrote: »

I came up to these parts in the early 1990s and remember with fondness the old windswept Crazy Prices Store based in some former industrial building.

I used to purchase pampers there on an industrial scale!

No trout in a bucolic stream but it had it's own charm.

I think our positive memories are more a reflection on where we were in life than the physical reality.

So many of today's kids will grow up thinking the new Shopping Centre is the Nirvana of their childhood memories!

What you say is quite true.
Believe it or not, I can remember when there were trout in that stream even though it was not bucolic in my time (60's and 70's).
There was always a sense of greater days gone by around that area.

Carpenter

slowburner wrote: »

Close to 'the tech' - you've gotta be from there - calling it the "cop shop"

Yes sir Taney Park:D:D:D:D:D

slowburner

then you remember 'the loony bin' too?:D

muckish

What about the remote controlled model cars races in the car park of H Williams? Now that was proper desire

Wild Bill

muckish wrote: »

What about the remote controlled model cars races in the car park of H Williams? Now that was proper desire

H Williams?

Was that store H Williams then Quinnsworth then Crazy Prices then Tesco?

I remember them racing remote controlled cars around a car park near the sports complex in Belfield - maybe they still do!

slowburner

muckish wrote: »

What about the remote controlled model cars races in the car park of H Williams? Now that was proper desire

Now there's a forgotten memory dredged up from the depths.

slowburner

Wild Bill wrote: »

H Williams?

Was that store H Williams then Quinnsworth then Crazy Prices then Tesco?

I remember them racing remote controlled cars around a car park near the sports complex in Belfield - maybe they still do!

It was.
Does anyone remember what it was before H.Williams? I'm pretty sure it was a factory of some sort.

CajunOnTour

slowburner wrote: »

It was.
Does anyone remember what it was before H.Williams? I'm pretty sure it was a factory of some sort.

I think it was called the Pye factory. They made radios or something.

dogmatix

No - the Pye factory was much closer to the village - roughly where Hamleys and Harvey Nicks are today. The old H-Williams/Tesco store was located roughly where the current Tesco's / Petrol station are today. The pye factory building became Dundrum bowl and Quazer until about 93-94 when it was badly damaged in a big flood and as far as I can remember it never re-opened.

I think it was H-Williams, then super crazy prices and then Tesco's - which I always thought was strange as there was another Tesco's a short stroll away in the old shopping centre (Lidl's are there now).

greenslider

I remember seeing trout in the slang near Dun Emer in the early 70's. Used to collect 3 spined sticklebacks in a jam jar at the stream. Then there was the bloom thing that lasted for a while and the river ran red/pale blue for a bit. People blamed the mint draining stuff into Gort Mhuire's lake..a drain from the lake used to join the slang at these two strange old farmhouses adjoining the monastery land on Ballinteer road. I had a pint in the DH, in the early nineties, with an old fellow whose house ( now roly's) was beside the old mill pond. He remembered messing about on an old row boat there and stories of trout in the pond. As for the H williams store..there is an identical building to what used to be there in the horan centre in Tralee. This building too, it turns out was a H williams originally. Dunnes are there now, to the best of my knowledge. I remember Hafners sausages on the left hand wing of the old h williams building. Think after they closed down, a chemist too some of the space and another sausage company had it for a bit.

Edit. Think it was H williams, then briefly Quinnsworth, then Crazy prices and then Tescos. Had a summer job there in the mid eighties. Got sent off to collect trollies out of the damn river...behind some flats down the village near Stella chipper. When I got back they found half the trolleys belonged to Superquinn in Ballinteer and wouldnt fit into the Crazy Prices trolleys! Have a funny feeling Tesco had it very briefly when they stuck a tentative toe in to the Irish market in the 70's?

slowburner

It's a small world.
I know just who that old fella you had a pint with, was. I grew up with his children and I use to paddle about in the pond myself.
There were indeed trout in the pond, big ones, but that was probably in the 1930s.
That old fella's father set up the PYE factory and was a keen amateur fisheries biologist.
He carried out experiments on the food of trout to see what differences it made to the colour of the flesh. He even wrote a short book which included the results of these experiments. I think there were very few copies ever printed and I only saw it myself once or twice.

The poor old river Slang.
Most of its problems were from short sighted planning in the past which treated it as an open sewer. That is what caused the blooms.
Domestic waste water killed it but there was a little pollution tolerant fish life in it prior to the development of the shopping centre. There was even one small trout in it, if I remember rightly from I survey I was involved in back then.
Right through the 70s, there were a series of catastrophic pollution events. These were caused by either diesel or heating oil getting into the Slang in quantity. I can remember the smell vividly. These events are probably what caused the weird colours you saw.

greenslider

...surprised i didnt end up with weils' disease with the amount of time I spent doodling around in the stream as a kid. I vividly remember colonies of timy freshwater clams down there into the earlyeighties and on one occasion was startled on the way home from school when the metallic flash of a kingfisher flew past me on the short cut through from the 48a bus stop at Lynwood Seldom go home much but a trip home to visit the folks at xmas involved bringing my kids down to aprox the same spot..theres a fly over there now. The river looks dead. There used to be stands of callitriche and elodea of some sort in the water....nothing now. I remember big mountain trout in the Whitechurch(?) river that ran down Grange Rd in Rathfarnahm in the eighties. Used to catch them and the odd eel with worms as kids. Wonder if theres anything there either now. As far as the old mill pond is concerned, at least the old copper beech in the garden survived..I remember looking at that from the top deck of the 44 years back. Dundrum was a great place to grow up..dont think it seems to be the same now though. Totally urbanised. Strange thing my Dad used to go to the races from Harcourt st with his Dad in the '40's. when i was growing up we used to collect frog spawn where the tracks had been. Now my kids take the LUAS to town with their Grandpa when we visit..full circle really. but those old ruined /burned out house grounds and bamboo plantations that dotted the sandyford area were the arcady of childhood adventure..

slowburner

Yep, there are still trout in that stream in Rathfarnham - plenty of them, believe it or not. It's called the Owendoher.
The Owendoher is probably cleaner now, than it used to be

You used to collect frogspawn from the old railway line?
I used to mess around in the water there myself - as you say, how the heck we didn't get Weil's disease, is a miracle. The water that used to flow through it was pretty clean all the same. I remember it being full of freshwater shrimp.
I never saw freshwater clams in the Slang - could these have been Swan Mussels? If so, the water had to have been very clean back then.
What has really killed the river is culverting (running it through pipes). I suppose most of it is culverted under the shopping mall now.
Not the cleverest thing in the world to do, if a stream is subject to runoff from the hills. Last October bore witness to that.

Rickwellwood

We used to live in one of the older bungalows towards the front of Balally Drive - Francis and John Brennan of Park Hotel Kenmare fame and on the telly box lived beside us. We lived there late 60's early 70's. I remember H Williams vividly. My dad used to take us shopping there on Thursday nights. I think thats the day he got paid every week. The place was huge and the car park even bigger.

Up where the "newer" houses in balally are now that was all fields. We used to take our bikes up there when we were kids. Balally Drive was a cul de sac so very few cars on the road way back then.

I go back to Dundrum maybe once a year and shudder at what has been done to it. Its awful.

slowburner

I don't go there at all now.
Dundrum was a country village until not too long ago.
I think anyone who lived there 20/30 years ago felt that they were a little bit separate from the 'burbs.
Somehow I always felt that Dundrum belonged more to Wicklow than Dublin.
I had to go for a meal once in a Thai (I think) restaurant in the centre.
I could see the house I grew up in, from the table. It was unnerving.

Somehow, I think that us old, sentimental, Dundrum fuddy duddies would be outnumbered by those who worship Mammon.

Wild Bill

Live just 2 miles up the hill (south) from Dundrum. Much improved if you ask me.

All this rosy-tinted stuff is a bit tiresome after a while.

We all think the world of our salad days was a better place.

We are usually wrong. :cool:

greenslider

Small grey/brown bivalve crustaceans..maybe 1mm-2mm in length. Remember they were really small anyway. In areas where the sediment wasnt too pervasive....not mussel shaped though. But as I am only familiar with marine mussels I dont know what they were.True Wild Bill..in retrospect the grass seems greener, the sky a deeper blue and the sunset a deeper hue, but Dundrum of old was a more rural place and the Sandyford I knew is now a forest of housing estates of varying architectural style and age much like any other suburb.... so noting that many former denizens have moved to more rural environs, I would suggest that Dundrum is very much an ideal home for the City Mouse, with but has ceased to be the home of the Country Mouse it once was.

slowburner

Aquatic snails, more than likely.

Wild Bill; different strokes for different folks.
If I was in Dundrum now, I don't think I would enjoy filling my lungs with the local air - I prefer unpolluted air.
I find it good for the soul to peer into the crystal clear water of the stream which runs alongside my house.
You'd be better off not looking at the Slang now, unless you want to reflect on how man can destroy natural resources.
I like knowing my neighbours and them knowing me.
I like the freedom to roam across fields rather than roaming around a shopping mall.
I like walking all day and only having wildlife for company.
I used to be able to go shooting in the fields in Dundrum, that is a fact, not a rose tinted memory.
I like seeing antiquities undisturbed or built on.
I like not sitting in traffic jams.
I like not having the constant noise of traffic.

Old Dundrum probably shaped much of my love of the countryside, because it was in the countryside.

Dundrum much improved?
Yes - but only if you like shopping.

Wild Bill

slowburner wrote: »

I like knowing my neighbours and them knowing me.
I like the freedom to roam across fields rather than roaming around a shopping mall.
I like walking all day and only having wildlife for company.
I used to be able to go shooting in the fields in Dundrum, that is a fact, not a rose tinted memory.
I like seeing antiquities undisturbed or built on.
I like not sitting in traffic jams.
I like not having the constant noise of traffic.

Dundrum much improved?
Yes - but only if you like shopping.

I could say exactly the same of myself!

What we both need is a one-off house in a rural spread-eagle!

I hate shopping, I hate traffic jams, but I still think Dundrum is much improved - and the air is pretty good.

Different strokes I guess - I just, personally, get tired of reading how everything and everywhere was better in some imagined past.

'Cos mostly it's just the "endless summer days" memory trick. It's our lost youth we really miss.

slowburner

Not quite under the shopping centre but close enough.
I had to kill some time in Dundrum today, so I went to St.Nahi's church.
It is well worth having a look around the cemetry, for those interested in that sort of thing.
It is in much better condition now than when I lived in Dundrum but still much in need of TLC.
It has an interesting history.
http://www.taneyparish.ie/history.html

greenslider

used to mess around there as teenagers..meet girls from notre dame there..they could have shot a few scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in that place..creepy with its crypts and cypress trees..

slowburner

Yew trees, in fact - commonly planted in cemeteries.:pac::pac:
What is it with teenagers and graveyards?

SerialComplaint

This video might be of interest to old Dundrum heads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ductuS1k8

Lots of the Slang still exists - running along side Wesley College, then along the old Ballinteer Road from Cahills Centra down between Ludford and Ashlawn. It resurfaces beside Dundrum Library and runs along the back of Dundrum Road.

slowburner

Thanks for posting that sad video.
Astonishing how much stuff is still in that place.
I guess the next phase is that the roving hordes will strip everything out, especially metal, and that's when the real destruction will begin.

Any idea about the intentions of the current owners?

kevkel

slowburner wrote: »

I don't go there at all now.
Dundrum was a country village until not too long ago.
I think anyone who lived there 20/30 years ago felt that they were a little bit separate from the 'burbs.
Somehow I always felt that Dundrum belonged more to Wicklow than Dublin.
I had to go for a meal once in a Thai (I think) restaurant in the centre.
I could see the house I grew up in, from the table. It was unnerving.

Somehow, I think that us old, sentimental, Dundrum fuddy duddies would be outnumbered by those who worship Mammon.

i to cycle to college there from whitechurch

greenslider

My kid sisters went there in the 70's and 80's...names of nuns like Dympna and Carmel..seen to bounce back in memory....strange to see the place in such disrepair...I guess the staff are all lay folk now..