THE bags of bedding compost are piled high in the aisles of the new Blanchardstown Centre in Co Dublin, due to open next Wednesday. They are awaiting the arrival of the seven metre trees from Florida which will grace the entrances to the four malls, decked out respectively in red, green, yellow and blue.
The car parks will also have a designated colour, to assist customers in finding their way around what has been described by the centre's manager, Mr Aidan Grimes, as "one of the largest retail and leisure developments ever built in Ireland".
"This development is more like Belfast's Castle Court than Tallaght's Square, which will be its main rival", Mr Grimes said. "The Square was the development at the time. Times have moved on."
He said that the centre had taken a number of design factors from shopping malls in the US, notably two major anchor shops at either end of a linear mall. There are six malls on two floors, all of them bright due to the huge expanse (an acre) of roof glass.
Representatives of the media were given a tour of the yet to be completed centre yesterday. Its first phase opens next week, and the second, including a UCI cinema complex, will open at the end of the year.
Journalists were bombarded with facts about the centre. It cost £100 million, it expects 300,000 shoppers a week and will employ 2,000 people in 105 retail outlets. More bizarrely, we were told that the central area can accommodate no less than two Boeing 747s in a nose to tail configuration.
The two anchor tenants are Roches Stores and Dunnes Stores, each with a supermarket section.
,Between them, they occupy 190,000 square feet.
About half of the remainder of the retail units are occupied by UK based companies, including Fosters Trading Company, which has no other outlet in the Republic and Monsoon, whose only other outlet is in Grafton Street.
Virgin and HMV music stores will both be there, as will the catalogue shop Argos, Mothercare, the Body Shop and its rival, Goodebodies, and a range of fashion shops, both Irish and English, such as Benetton, Bests, Milletts, Miss Selfridge, Next, Principles and Wallis.
Six financial institutions will have outlets there, as will nine restaurants, all branches of existing chains such as Bewleys, Burger King, Eddie Rockets and the British chain, Uppercrust.
It will, of course, like all such centres nowadays, have a creche, sponsored by Heinz.