An ice rink is set to inhabit the former Dunnes Stores unit at Cork’s North Main Street Shopping Centre as a new owner of the building plans to “breathe life back into the city centre.”<\/p>\n
ONICE, which has operated skating rinks at Marina Market for the past three years, will move to the North Main St location.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another ice rink firm, Cork on Ice, will now take over the Marina Market location.<\/p>\n
ONICE founder Jason Williams said he hoped the seasonal pop-up in the former Dunnes Stores would bring “a struggling part of the city… to life.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cosmetic work before the rink’s opening on November 6, including a repaint of the front of the shopping centre building, is under way.<\/p>\n
The supermarket unit has been empty since it was used as a HSE covid vaccination centre in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before that, it had a short life as an indoor bike parking facility.<\/p>\n
The shopping centre was developed in conjunction with a 400-space multi-storey car park in the 1980s, the latter of which is now owned and operated by Cork City Council.<\/p>\n
Cork County Council planning records show its developer, Owen O’Callaghan, obtained permission for a skating rink in the building in 2005.<\/p>\n
The site’s anchor tenant, Dunnes Stores, vacated the premises in 2016, with the centre struggling to secure new tenants since.<\/p>\n
A number of other units within the shopping centre are now being advertised as to let within the ‘North Gate Quarter’, a rebranding of the shopping centre.<\/p>\n
The shopping centre is still under the control of developer BMOR, the London-based firm with Irish directors who have Cork family roots.<\/p>\n
They also acquired the former Munster Furniture Centre, which was ravaged by fire in 2008.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They subsequently invested \u20ac40m into a 285-bed student accommodation building, which opened in 2023.<\/p>\n
Williams said the “wonderful” new owners are “trying to breathe life back into the city centre”, and described his rink as “a pivotal part of that”.<\/p>\n
At the southern end of North Main St, Cork City Council issued a request for tenders to regenerate three vacant buildings at 62-65 North Main St, which suffered a partial collapse in 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It described the ideal proposal for the buildings in its ownership as being for “high-quality urban design” with the intention of disposing of the land to the successful developer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An ice rink is set to inhabit the former Dunnes Stores unit at Cork’s North Main Street Shopping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5658,72,4257,79,61,60],"class_list":["post-662254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-irish-examiner-instagram","tag-business","tag-cork-business","tag-cork-news","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}