ormond hotel

LITTLE STRAND STREET RUNS BEHIND THE ORMOND HOTEL SITE

There are two sections to Strand Street the section from Lower Liffey Street to Capel Street is Great Strand Street and upon crossing Capel Street is becomes Little Strand Street. There are two building sites on Little Strand Street and to the best of my knowledge a hotel is to be built on the one at the junction with Capel street. During the planning phase the city council claimed plans for the hotel at the corner of Capel Street and Strand Street Little would “exacerbate” the over concentration of hotels and fundamentally undermine the vision for the provision of a dynamic mix of uses within the city centre area, however planning permission has been granted.

Little Strand Street is even less known to most Dubliners that Great Strand Street. Little Strand street runs behind the construction site that once was the Ormond Hotel and it connects Capel Street to East Arran Street which in turn connects Mary’s Abbey to Ormond Quay.

A €25 million redevelopment of the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay was expected to have been complete by March or April of 2020 but work works appears to have been suspended.

By the end of 2019, there was planning permission in place for as many as a hundreds hotels apart-hotels, and student accommodation complexes in Dublin city and the majority were within walking distance of my apartment. Today in 2022 there are many half-built and unoccupied hotels. At this stage I cannot determine if the Ormond Hotel redevelopment project is to continued but judging by the state of the construction of the site there is every reason to be concerned.

The Ormond Hotel was located on Dublin’s historic Georgian quays, which were laid out by the Duke of Ormond in the late 17th century. The Ormond Hotel, which began operating from the site in 1889, was building of special cultural significance on account of it being the fictional location for the Sirens episode of James Joyce’s magnum opus, Ulysses, which chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904.