Where I LiveThe Ringsend/ Sandymount area of Dublin is changing with a speed that is both exciting and intimidating, says local resident Rose Doyle, who finds herself surrounded by cranes and towering buildings
My neighbourhood is old and gloriously worn with Dublin life, the city's history writ everywhere in the streets and in landmark buildings.
Beggar's Bush Barracks (built in 1827 for infantry soldiers) is metres from my doorstep. The Grand Canal Dock (completed in 1796 as a traffic route to the west) is a short trot in the other direction. Ball's Bridge (rebuilt after a storm in 1835) is just around the corner.
The brown waters of the Dodder flow through it all and the barber's pole chimneys at the Pigeon House belch merrily above it all.
Nowhere in town do houses in such variety sit cheek by happy jowl. My cul-de-sac of modest, latterly much extended and sought after two-up-two-down houses was built c 1924. Named after Michael Malone - who died in the siege of nearby Northumberland Road in 1916 - they've grown comfortably with the neighbourhood.
So too have the houses in O'Connell and Derrynane Gardens, built around the same time. Bath Avenue, our elegantly eccentric main boulevard, was the first road built after the Dodder delta was reclaimed in 1792. Vavasour and Havelock squares are Victorian jewels. The list goes on but I will rest my case.
There's a life and neighbourliness second to none. There's a beat in the streets and a sense of itself you couldn't buy for love but which, with frightening speed, looks like its being bought for money.
Because, though our proximity to town is a joy and undoubted advantage, it's also a liability, depending on how you look at things.
Developers, development and a growing city have seen and seized the proximity advantage and things are a-changing, massively.
That the same is true of every close-to-city-centre neighbourhood like ours worldwide is a comfort, but a small one. It began about a decade ago, slowly at first but with an increasing and intimidating speed that's left us at odds with the buildings rising all around, fearful for what's being lost and of being lost ourselves in the shadows of the towering concrete and glass buildings housing apartments, offices and leisure facilities.
Which is not to say all is negative; just that the scope (and height) of the changes are as awesome as they are impressive and, in some cases, quite beautiful.
"The thing I want to know," a neighbour puts the question everyone wants an answer to, "is when is it all going to stop?
"When there isn't an ounce of space left for us to live and breathe in? And where's the scale model? And where are all the cars going to go? We get information in bits and pieces and don't know where we are."
One of the first buildings to change the skyline was the Millennium Tower on Charlotte Quay. Since then the Grand Canal Dock has been changing daily and the area around South Lotts Road and Shelbourne Road dog track transformed. We live these days with the boom in Barrow Street, where the city's major developers forge ahead with the building of architecturally fascinating office and apartment blocks.
We've got used to regular updates through our letter boxes from the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.
It's good news, we know, that the south docklands will have 3,000 new homes, over 100,000 sq m (1m sq ft) of offices spread over the former Bord Gáis Éireann site as well as cultural buildings, a hotel, restaurants, bars and shops.
We keep an eye, having won the war to have the original plans modified, on the Zoe Developments scheme in and around the Victorian gasometer where offices and a 600- apartment complex grow daily.
New neighbours in the area are Google, which has already taken some 6,320 sq m (68,027 sq ft) in said Gasworks development.
Bernard McNamara's company is building 8,918 sq m (96,000 sq ft) of offices and some 110 apartments in Grand Mill Quay.
Treasury and CIÉ plan to build a new concourse at Barrow Street DART station which will have shops and 220 apartments.
Treasury, too, has just lodged an application for a 32-storey building at the Boland's Mill end of the street.
Dev and the lads who fought there in 1916 may be doing the proverbial spin in their resting places. Or maybe not.
As if all this wasn't enough to be going on with, there's the breaking news of draft proposals from Dublin City Council for a new town in Irishtown/Poolbeg which will involve the renovation of the area of the South Bank/Poolbeg Peninsula.
We first heard about it when the plans went on public display and now, of course, we're worried about the Shelley Banks beach and the Great South Wall and more high rise apartments where ordinary size houses would better suit.
"There's no mention of the smell from the sewage plant on the peninsula," my neighbour says darkly, "who's going to want to live beside that?" Indeed. Nor any mention either of the controversial plans for an incinerator.
Then there are our issues with the IRFU and its plans for a new national stadium at Lansdowne Road.
There is general goodwill about the stadium but little heart for the fate of O'Connell Gardens, which looks like it will be cast into shadow, and desolation about the certain loss of a large swathe of the leafy and much treasured walk along the Dodder.
Maurice Craig, writing in 1972, wondered if the city's "flavour, the impalpable social filaments", could survive the strains of the growth which was then only a promise.
"Urbanism," he opined, "and its cousin urbanity, is a delicate amalgam of architecture, social habit, economics and transport." A wise man - but who listened?
Change is inevitable, my neighbours agree. The high rise buildings might not effect the community all that much, they say, philosophically.
They accept the world phenomenon that the development of neighbourhoods, like ours, close to city centres, is inevitable.
But they lament too: about the lack of care for the community and life of the area, the dwarfing of existing dwellings, the way so many will be put into cold shadows.
When it's all done and dusted we will, of course, be living in a doubtlessly much sought-after location. But then we always were.
