Athlone Town Centre

Athlone Town Centre is a landmark mixed-use regeneration project that redefines the core of Athlone, stitching the historic town centre to a new quarter of retail, residential, leisure and civic uses. Located on a 2.9-hectare site close to the River Shannon, the development delivers approximately 108,390sqm of built form including 66 retail units, 148 apartments, five restaurants and a café, an 11-storey 167-bed four-star hotel, a covered street and public square, a crèche and 1,140 car parking spaces.

The project is as much about urban renewal and placemaking as it is about retail. A new network of streets, lanes, squares and courtyards was woven into land that had long sat outside the town’s urban structure, reintroducing permeability and reinforcing connections between existing civic routes and public spaces. This spatial framework supports a lively sequence of internal and external environments that accommodate everyday life, commercial activity and community engagement.

The architectural expression is responding to Athlone’s historic grain, scale and materiality while establishing a coherent mixed-use destination. Athlone Town Centre received the Irish Planning Institute Urban Design Award in 2008, with the judges noting it as “a new urban quarter of exceptional architectural quality and coherence.”