Arklow, in Co Wicklow, has Ireland’s longest masonry arch bridge. Designed by the engineer Andrew Noble and heroically built by manual labour in the 1750s, it spans the Avoca river’s estuary. Although shorn of stone parapets and extended laterally in the 1960s, it is still known by its original name of the Nineteen Arches Bridge.
What has passed beneath the bridge for decades is shameful, however. The swirling waters carried not only toxic effluents from long-ceased copper mining upriver in the Vale of Avoca, and from the former Irish Fertiliser Industries plant closer to Arklow, but also all of the town’s untreated sewage, which was discharged directly into the river – ironically, via 19 outfalls along its banks.
Efforts by Wicklow County Council to deal with this dreadful pollution became mired in controversy about where a wastewater-treatment plant should be located. An early proposal to install it among the sand dunes at Seabank was fought all the way to the Supreme Court by owners of a local caravan park – and by the time it ruled against them, in 2011, coastal erosion meant the site was no longer viable.
Back in 2005 Karin Dubsky of Coastwatch Ireland suggested the former IFI site as a better location for the treatment plant. But one local councillor, Peter Dempsey, got so irritated by the ongoing uncertainty that he staked a poster in the Avoca river in 2007 showing a cartoon figure sitting on a toilet, with a caption reading: “Cut the crap, stop the objections, Arklow needs its sewage plant now”.
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By then Ireland was in breach of the EU’s wastewater-treatment directive in failing to ensure that all urban areas had adequate sewage-treatment facilities. And in 2017 the European Commission took a legal action against the government in the European Court of Justice. In 2019 the court found that Ireland had indeed failed to comply with the directive, leaving open the prospect of financial sanctions.
Irish Water, since rebranded as Uisce Éireann, was already on the Arklow case and decided in 2016 that the best location for its treatment plant would be a site at Ferrybank, on a promontory between the Avoca river and the Irish Sea, occupied by the long-derelict Wallboard factory (previously Arklow Gypsum), alongside large storage tanks for heavy fuel oil, nitric acid and sodium hydroxide.
Because the site was made ground, probably constructed using spoil from Avoca Mines, it is contaminated by concentrations of heavy metals such as copper and zinc, as well as by toxic lead and arsenic. So there could be no question of excavating the ground to “bury” the proposed sewage works, as some objectors sought. Instead it was going to be highly visible from the town it serves.
This prompted An Bord Pleanála, during its preapplication consultations with Irish Water in May 2016, to emphasise that “a high design quality would be required in respect of the proposed development given that it would be located in an urban area”. In effect, the board was proposing that architects would need to be involved in the €140 million project rather than leaving it to engineers alone.
Clancy Moore won the commission, following interviews with a selected panel of potential candidates. It was a coup for this relatively small practice with a reputation for bespoke work that is often both playful and profound, such as an ingenious aluminium-clad writing room for the novelist Eoin Colfer in the back garden of his Dublin home – one of Dermot Bannon’s Super Spaces.
According to Andrew Clancy, the Arklow project “marks the first time in the world that an architect has been an integrated part of the design team for a wastewater treatment plant”. The pagoda-style pavilions on Dún Laoghaire’s West Pier from where sewage is pumped to the Ringsend treatment plant, at Poolbeg, were designed by the architect Paul O’Toole, but Clancy says Arklow was of a different order.
From the outset Clancy Moore stressed “an understanding of conversation as a vital design tool” in collaborating with other professionals involved in the project – a whole range of engineers specialising in everything from odours to industrial processes, as well as ecologists, planners, cost-control experts and consultation facilitators – but also with the Ferrybank site, its history and its setting.
This approach derived from their experience in making “deeply collaborative public work” such as the Red Pavilion, at London Festival of Architecture in 2015, and the intimacy of doing dozens of domestic projects. It’s based on “listening closely to the client, taking time and researching the specifics of the brief and of the site, understanding the many contexts of a project and, in doing so, developing a design response”.
Officially, Clancy Moore were subcontractors to the project’s consultant engineers, Arup and, later, Ayesa. “At the start we would speak and be rebuffed most of the time, because we didn’t have a clue. But then they’d say yes, and we’d know we were on to something, so that’s how we ran it,” Clancy says. “What it shows is that architects can do things like this, and should be doing more of them.”
The design that emerged was “a radical reinvention” of the typical wastewater treatment plant. Unlike a conventional plant that pumps multiple times from tank to tank, in Arklow there is only one pump lift, with the rest of the flow happening by gravity – dramatically reducing energy consumption. Roofs double as solar farms, with arrays of photovoltaic panels to offset the plant’s electricity use.
A new interceptor sewer now takes all of Arklow’s wastewater to the Ferrybank site, where it is processed in two steel-framed buildings with a strongly defined character: layered facades composed of corrugated light-green open louvres, made in Switzerland from fibre cement, which were designed to distribute air, assist with odour control and even provide habitats for bats and nesting birds.
Apart from the two large structures, the site includes a smaller two-storey administration and laboratory building, clad in fibre-cement panels in the same colour with a V-shaped roof profile, and an enclosure containing a trio of sludge tanks. Unseen, of course, is a 930m outfall pipe that discharges treated effluent in the sea bed; it was shipped in three sections from Norway.
As Clancy told An Bord Pleanála’s oral hearing in January 2019, the architectural approach sought to contribute positively to the visual environment of Arklow by acknowledging the town’s industrial history and long maritime tradition while providing “contemporary civic buildings” that reflect the core function and purpose of these structures – to treat municipal sewage.
In his report the senior planning inspector Paul Caprani – who is now a Bord Pleanála board member – concluded that the design approach “represents a successful architectural solution and provides an appropriate compromise between providing a building which accommodates a large infrastructural development but respects the scale of buildings in the vicinity and its setting in the docklands/waterfront area”.
Nearly a third of the site is to be rewilded. It is protected from the sea by a rock-armoured earthen bank, or revetment, that is (rather optimistically) intended to survive a one-in-1,000-year storm. This is to be landscaped and turned into an amenity area by Wicklow County Council, whose planners Clancy Moore kept in the loop even though they had no role in the statutory consent process.
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The lack of a sewage-treatment plant was a significant constraint on the development of Arklow, which has a population of 13,000. (It is the county’s third-largest town.) The new facility, which is due to be officially opened in early May, would allow the town to triple in size, with much of this growth expected to take the form of new apartment buildings in the port area, replacing redundant industrial buildings and derelict sites along the waterfront.
In most urban areas, sewage works are located out of sight and out of mind, as if there’s something shameful about processing the waste we all generate from the consumption of food to keep ourselves going, so that it doesn’t contaminate rivers, lakes and the sea around us. But Arklow’s new green wonder is there for all to see – an essential piece of civic infrastructure that deserves to be celebrated.
