It's time to rescue the city's jaded and homogenised shopping thoroughfare, urges Frank McDonald
Grafton Street is no longer the "wonderland" touted in Dublin Can Be Heaven. Over the past 30 years it has lost most of the indigenous shops that gave it real character and variety, making way for changelings that can be seen on almost any high street anywhere in Europe.
The toll has been terrible. Gone from the street are Combridge's fine art and books, Dixon and Hempenstall's, the Eblana bookshop, Lipton's grocery, Louis Wine's antiques, Robert Roberts cafe, McConnell's fish shop and, much more recently, FX Kelly.
If Weir's were to follow, the street would be finished.
Of the 90-odd businesses trading on Grafton Street in 1969, only about 20 have survived. More and more, their places have been taken by multiples such as HMV, Jigsaw, Levi's, Marks and Spencer, Monsoon, Miss Selfridge, Next, Principles, H. Samuel and Tie Rack, as well as Burger King and McDonald's.
The street even lost Switzer's, one of its two department stores, when it was taken over and occupied by Brown Thomas in 1995 after the original BT building was acquired by Marks and Spencer.
Bally and Clarks shoes, Laura Ashley, O2 and River Island are also familiar names from British high streets.
What lies behind the changing face of Grafton Street is the fact that most of its buildings are now owned by pension funds, financial institutions and property investors. And they have only one item on their agenda - to extract the maximum rental return from every square metre of "Zone A" retail space.
Research in 2004 by London surveyors CWHB found that Grafton Street had become the world's fifth most expensive street on which to run a shop, outpaced only (in descending order) by New York's Fifth Avenue, the Champs-Elysées in Paris, Hong Kong's Causeway Bay and Oxford Street in London.
With an average annual rent of €3,372 per square metre, few but the multiples can afford to trade on Grafton Street any more - unless they are fortunate to own their premises.
Ordinary shop buildings with quite narrow street frontages fetch staggering sums as they increasingly become investment vehicles.
Bewley's Oriental Cafe was saved only by the will of the people when its owners, Treasury Holdings, sought to prevent Jay Bourke from reopening it last year as CafeBarDeli. Grafton Street's descent into the homogenised depths of "Euro trash" shopping is mirrored elsewhere. Amsterdam's Kalverstraat, one of the oldest pedestrian shopping streets in Europe, is now all but engulfed by such stores, and the more exclusive boutiques have decamped to another part of town.
The same will happen here unless Grafton Street is rescued. Visually, it looks jaded compared to Henry Street, which has been transformed by the new-look Roches Stores; the hideous "Euro brick" paving, laid in 1988, desperately needs to be replaced with a stone surface more appropriate to its status.
Dublin City Council's move to designate Grafton Street as an Architectural Conservation Area, where special planning controls will apply, is coming very late in the day - perhaps too late to halt the downward spiral. But at least this is better than leaving its fate to market forces alone.