No amount of Darts or 145 buses can hide the fact that Bray is a town with terrible traffic management
FIFTY THOUSAND squillion cars packed into a country lane at the entrance to an overbuilt, under-resourced country town. Clearly that doesn’t exist and I’m making it up.
The town in question is Bray, where the people are damned to be neither totally Wicklovian nor true-blue Dubs. They watch Fair City, all the while looking longingly at the picture of Biddy and Miley hanging over the mantelpiece.
Bray was originally not an option for us, for several reasons. The first was taxis. It always astounded me how taxi drivers broke into a sulk when friends from Bray wanted to get home from Dublin city centre, not a million miles away: 46,000 people live there, which is something like the fare they’d quote my friends.
I’m sure quite a few folks in Bray might want to escape the seaside for an evening, dodging refuse sacks on Grafton Street on a damp Thursday night. Instead their evenings are curtailed.
The other reason I didn’t want to consider Bray kept slipping from my mind, until last Saturday. I was on the phone, simultaneously trying to get out the door and view a house on the Bray seafront. It had been on the market when we first started looking, and we had assumed it had been sold aeons ago. Yet there it was, on the market again for a cool €495k.
It was within budget, and with investors licking their wounds, surely this could be a genuine opportunity to get a 19th century seaside home of eternal loveliness.
At any rate, loads of people who end up talking to us about buying a house have asked us if we’ve looked in the north Wicklow metropolis.
I don’t know if Bray can be called “sought after”, but it certainly has its furtive admirers, like the kooky looking girl that no one will go up to until someone else makes the first move. Look at Maggie Gyllenhaal, she’s a fashionista now. But then again, as Mary Coughlan knows, beware the F-moniker.
On top of that, the house had the ominous sounding zoning designation of B1. What the bloody hell did that mean?
Maureen didn’t know and neither, I’m sorry to say, did I. I found out later on that a B1 zoning has an interesting definition “to protect and enhance the special physical and social character of existing town and village centres and to provide new and improved town centre facilities and uses”.
The house certainly looked inviting, though it needed a good deal of decorative work. And the idea of working on a house that had some kind of remit regarding its potential development sounded like a challenge to be up for, price being right: matching heritage with homeliness.
Down by the seafront, you could wake up every day to the breathtaking view of our best escape route off the island. To the right, on Bray Head, is Ireland’s answer to Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, a great big cross put up during the Marian year, 1954, presumably anticipating the crucifixion of André the Giant.
It’s quite something to have on your doorstep and you can have candy floss everyday if you want, after playing the slots down at the amusements. What more do you want?
The interior we couldn’t have a peek at. In true Morgan fashion, we were quite late. Interestingly, we weren’t the only ones either: quite a few cars were pulling up as people wanted to have a look at the house, pulling out almost as quickly.
Presumably the gridlock we had been met with got these poor blighters too, and so they wanted to hightail it out of there ASAP.
And that’s the problem. The house was very pretty. The view was to die for.
No matter what way you’re looking at it though, you’re trapped in this town that has zero intelligent planning in terms of traffic management.
Traffic enters Bray from Shankill with about as much ease and lack of stress as a circus midget trying to make love to Sophie Dahl.
No amount of Darts or 145 buses can hide that. So what special character there is in Bray is left to choke on petrol fumes and frustration.
We’ll keep looking.
