Context 163 - March 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 15 Ireland CHARLES DUGGAN The making of the 14 Henrietta Street Museum The museum is dedicated to broadening understanding of the street’s chequered social and architectural history, while giving primacy to the story of those who lived in Dublin’s tenements. on Henrietta Street were in use as tenements. In that year 87 people lived in No 14, which increased to 100 by 1911, while 956 people lived in Henrietta Street’s 19 houses. Across Dublin at this time approximately 118,000 working-class people lived in former Georgian townhouses, appropriated but barely equipped, and mostly unfit for multiple occupancy. By the mid-20th century the precarity that defined the lives of so many of Henrietta Streets early tenement residents eased somewhat and a close, although always struggling community, developed.By the 1970s the street’s population had declined. Many of the families had moved to purpose- built housing in the growing outer suburbs of the capital. The Henrietta Street houses were gradually acquired by pioneering conservation- ists, many of whom saved them from further dereliction and potential redevelopment. Artists’ studios replaced tenement flats in some, and others reverted to private dwellings, while the presence of the street’s educational, charitable and cultural institutions continued. A suitable long-term use was not secured for 14 Henrietta Street after it closed as a tenement in 1979. The building suffered from ill-consid- ered interventions to stabilise it structurally and He emerged from under the feudal arch of the King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street. The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp. A horde of grimy children populated the street.They stood or ran in the roadway, or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors, or squatted like mice upon the thresholds. He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered. James Joyce, ‘A Little Cloud’, in Dubliners , 1914 Henrietta Street represents two divergent his- tories. It is the city’s first and arguably its finest 18th-century Georgian street, once occupied by influential members of the Anglo-Irish aris- tocracy. It also represents the high point of the overcrowded and squalid tenement housing conditions that existed in much of inner-city Dublin during the late 19th and 20th-centuries. A new museum, developed by Dublin City Council, opened on this street in 2018, following a decade-long programme of conservation work informed by new academic research, community engagement and oral history testimonies. Henrietta Street, laid out by the politician, banker and property tycoon Luke Gardiner, was built piecemeal over three decades from the early 1720s. 14 Henrietta Street was among the last houses to be constructed as part of a speculative development of three large four- bay, four-storey over-basement houses, built by Gardiner between 1748 and 1750. From the beginning the very top layer of Irish society were drawn to the street. By the 1750s its man- sions were inhabited by prominent members of the Anglo-Irish establishment, including peers, bishops, MPs and members of the judiciary. Among them was the Rt Hon General Richard Molesworth, commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland, who in 1751 moved with his growing family to No 14. He is followed by a series of distinguished residents including John Bowes, Lord Chancellor of Ireland; Sir Lucius O’Brien of Dromoland; Sir John Hotham, Bishop of Clogher; and CharlesViscount Dillon.The house remained a residence until around 1850, when it was converted to the offices and court house of the Encumbered Estates Court, and later to a hostel for families of the Dublin Militia. Ultimately, in 1877, the house was carved up to form 19 tenement flats. By 1901 most houses The facade of 14 Henrietta Street (All photos: Paul Tierney Photography, reproduced courtesy of Dublin City Council)