This blog.

A friend of mine said to me before that "when you get older, you become what you hate". From reading this blog, you might think that here at Derelict Dublin, from our continual harping on about the causes and effects of dereliction in the city, that we hated the process and visible results of it. Far from it! It gives us something to bitch about and makes us open our eyes when we're wandering around the city. But, as you may have noticed in recent months, the level of postings has decreased dramatically. The blog itself has become neglected, unkempt, a bit of an eyesore. Much like many of the buildings described within.

So what's caused this then? Call it a general malaise. We're growing tired of this city, and recently having visited two other urban centres where the energy and noise (and sunshine) far exceeded anything that this miserable little place could generate. Its time to vacate the premises and move on somewhere else. There are many other derelicts we've come across which have been photographed and sniffed around, but never felt the need to document here. We'll see what happens with our new residence; whether it lives up to expectations. We might be back here sooner than we think. But hopefully not. Dublin is boring now. Even the recession is boring. We cant listen or read another article about how its somehow the 80's all over again. Give us a break. And when the recession is over (its all boom/bust/boom/bust, thats how capitalist economies go) its not as if somehow all the idiots in the city will have changed. They'll all be back in Dundrum en masse as if it never happened. For many it wont have anyway.

So thats all folks. We'll leave this blog here, vacant and decaying, as a little momento/historical archive for googlers to stumble across, but dont expect any updates any time soon. Over and out.

The Thomas House, 86 Thomas Street, Dublin 8

One word: Ha! Never was there a more cautionary tale of Celtic Tiger excess than this place here. I passed by it recently and admittedly danced a little jig of schadenfreudic glee at its demise. What do you do if you have a cool, authentic, small, old, run down little pub, right next to an art college, with relaxed staff, music on every night of the week, with queues out the door at the weekend, with people like Andy Weatherall playing surprise DJ sets there, with people up dancing on the tables and chairs in a raucous atmosphere, having a great time, and pouring money into the tills of the pub? Why, you shut it down for a couple of years of course! Thereby alienating any of the regular clientele you had who felt they had a bit of ownership over the place by organising the music nights there, and then renovate it into a soulless, steel and black leather, generic boozer that you could find in any other part of the city, with zero character and zero atmosphere, build some equally generic apartments over it, and what do you get? A derelict pub! Here's a word of advice for any would be investors out there who think that gutting a pub and making it nice and new and fancy will suddenly bring in a load more business (another example at the moment is Walsh's in Stoneybatter) - LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE. Some of your customers might actually like the old tattered seats, the carpets, the welcoming smell of generations of spilled beer. The Thomas House tried to recapture its cool with DJs and the like, performing in the non-space of upstairs, and occasionally getting a crowd in downstairs in the miserable basement, but to be honest I'm glad its closed, may it stand as a shining example of the idiocy of killing the goose that lays the golden egg in early 2000's Dublin.