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DUBLIN’S TENEMENT MUSEUM is aiming to gather firsthand testimony of tenement life in the capital from people through a series of drop-in events across Dublin in the coming months.
The project, Your Tenement Memories, kicked off on Tuesday and will travel to Drimnagh, Ballymun, Walkinstown, Crumlin, Cabra, Darndale, Coolock, Finglas, Donnycarney and Ballyfermot - areas to which people were relocated from the 1930s onwards.
“There’s a whole social history out there and it won’t be around for that much longer,”
Melanie Wright, of Dublin City Council Culture Company, has said.
Dublin Tenement Museum at 14 Henrietta Street opened in September and as part of ongoing research efforts the Culture Company’s engagement team has been gathering first-hand testimony from those who experienced tenement living and the stories from their subsequent relocation out of the city centre into suburbia, says Wright.
It’s an important story we wanted to capture.
Built in the late 1740s, No. 14 Henrietta Street was turned into a tenement in the 1870s and remained so until the last families left in the late 1970s.
At one point in 1911 the building was home to 100 people from 17 families who had access to only two bathrooms and two taps of cold running water.
As suburbanisation grew Dublin’s tenements gradually emptied, however, as families moved out to newly created suburbs either side of the River Liffey like Coolock and Ballyfermot.
“People have spoken about how different it was,” says Wright. “Suddenly they had two bedrooms, a garden. For many, it was like being in the countryside.
Throughout the spring, suburbs like Ballymun and Drimnagh will host individual two-hour oral history sessions organised by the museum’s engagement team.
These testimonies will then be collected for the museum as a part of ongoing research to capture as many first-hand experiences of tenement life as possible.
The next session will be held at Our Lady’s Hall in Drimnagh followed by a session at Ballymun Library the following Wednesday.
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14 Henrietta Street is fantastic for both tourists and locals. The guide takes you upstairs to huge staircase for the music room, drawing room and bedroom and you hear about the great and the good, eg Gardiner, Molesworth and names you know. Right out of a Jane Austin novel
Then a swift shock to the system when you go the corridor neglected by slumlords and to the basement how people in the 1900’s lived
You finish on the 1st floor when a family as recently as the 1970’s lived. Delph with the Chinese patterns, godawful smelling carbolic soap (some love the smell??), lucozade when it was a health product in a glass bottle and other products
The guides are super and love their job, buy a ticket :)
@Michael McLoughlin:
Still use the Carbolic soap , yer only man for the weekly wash. Can also be used as a deodorant and as paint remover. Mrs not too keen on it mind you.
Fantastic job done by all involved in putting this together, and the guides brilliant !! Couldn’t recommend enough .
Mother was a nurse in the old coombe hospital at Meath st. God she tells some horrific stories of calls to tenements in that area
@Eamonn O Connell: wow, I’m a nurse,would love to hear your mams stories.
@Gill Dempsey: Somme very sad stories of hard births and lost babies. The poverty was unbelievable but the people were very good she could walk up Meath Street and into any tenement building at any hour and got only the height of respect from people. no fear of being attacked are interfered with in any way
Once it got dark we had to use a bucket for the loo . The 2 toilets were in a little yard under street level. A back stairs led down to them. Rats were always around. No go area at night.
The tenements are making a comeback!
Does anyone know if Henrietta Street was the actual street used as the fictional Chandlers Court in the classic 1980 RTE rendition of Strumpet City by James Plunkett?
I’m a Bolton St DIT Eng graduate (1990) and remember well the near by cobbled stoned Street that is Henrietta St, leading up to Kings Inns.
I have a US version of the DVD and still enjoy watching it – Real Dublin entertainment! (It does however put my 3 US teen sons to sleep
I have a very intresting story from care at 16 into a tenement what a disaster who needs a mother she was not a fit mother
Does anyone know if Henrietta Street was the actual street used as the fictional Chandlers Court in the classic 1980 RTE rendition of Strumpet City by James Plunkett?
I’m a Bolton St DIT Eng graduate (1990) and remember well the near by cobbled stoned Street that is Henrietta St, leading up to Kings Inns.
I have a US version of the DVD and still enjoy watching it – Real Dublin entertainment! (It does however put my 3 US teen sons to sleep
Over the last few days you have used a number of photographs to which I own the copyright [the Chinese New Year being another example] … my photographs are made available free of charge to anyone who wishes to use them [many are used by Wikipedia] but in order to use them you must clearly indicate who owns the copyright and you must supply a proper link to the source. Indicating that the source is Wikipedia Commons is the source is not sufficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Street,_Dublin. For copyright conditions please refer to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HENRIETTA_STREET_-_DUBLIN_(402556531).jpg
I visited 14 Henrietta Street last week. It is a brilliant experience and I would highly recommend it!
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