Cork City Council has granted permission to Pontorac Ltd for 103 homes at Pope’s Hill, Pope’s Road, Blackpool, on a 2.58 hectare site about 400 metres east of Blackpool village, between the Glentrasna estate to the north and Collins Barracks to the east, with the military cemetery on its northwest side.
Fifty townhouses and 53 duplex apartments, two to four storeys: 18 one-beds, nine two-beds, 68 three-beds and eight four-beds. Twenty-one units go to the council under Part V social housing, and a housing association will deliver and manage the entire development. A terrace of four existing houses, three derelict, is demolished and replaced with a single bungalow for the site’s owner.
The numbers that matter to anyone trading nearby are not the ones in the headline.
Sixty-eight three-bedroom units out of 103. A creche for 38 children. Two pedestrian links into Glentrasna Park. Four hundred metres to the village.
That combination describes a specific kind of customer arriving at a specific time. Three-bed homes near a barracks and a creche means households with young children. A 38-place creche means a drop-off window, five mornings a week, between roughly eight and nine. Two pedestrian links mean those parents can walk out of the estate rather than drive out of it, and 400 metres is an easy distance on the way back from the creche and a difficult one on the way to a car.
So the trade this development creates is a weekday morning trade, concentrated in a ninety-minute window, arriving on foot, with a pram.
That is an entirely different business from an evening trade or a commuter trade. It wants somewhere to put the pram, it wants to be served in four minutes, it wants something for the child, and it is fiercely loyal once established because the route is a habit rather than a decision. It also collapses in August.
The design detail suggests the developers understand where people will walk. The site rises about 28 metres from its northwest corner to its southeast, handled with split-level buildings and terraced gardens, and it is laid out in three character areas: a formal square facing the military cemetery, a central village green, and a grid of avenues referencing the military neighbours. A village green is where people stop.
The 104 car parking spaces against 128 cycle spaces is the other tell. More bikes than cars, in a scheme where most units are family-sized.
There is more coming. A separate application from Homeland Projects Ltd for 68 homes on adjacent lands, 62 houses and two triplex blocks, is still being assessed.
One hundred and three doors, four hundred metres from the village, thirty-eight of them with a creche run attached.
Source: Irish Examiner, “New housing plan for Cork’s Pope’s Hill are approved”
