Dublin's renewal
Kevin Cunningham loves old houses. "They become your whole world, your whole passion," he tells us. A spry figure in a fedora hat, Kevin's current passion is 12 Henrietta Street, on Dublin's north side. It is one of a dozen or so townhouses on the broad, sloping street, all built in the 1720s. When the homes were new, this was a most exclusive address and set the standard for fine Georgian housing in the city. "It was the wealthiest street in Dublin for about half an hour," Kevin says wryly.
But prosperity did not hang around in Henrietta Street. By the mid-1800s, these dwellings had become tenements, in some cases home to more than 100 people each. A century later, many Dublin houses of this size and vintage were in extremely poor condition, even collapsing and killing people. Once-grand houses sold for as little as IR£10,000 ($17,800) in the 1980s. Many were demolished.
Henrietta Street's fortunes have revived considerably in more recent times. Film and television productions first came to the street in the 70s, attracted by its suitably cinematic air of faded grandeur. Since then, nearly 50 productions have been shot here.
No. 12 Henrietta Street has been owned by a friend of Kevin's since the early 80s and he now manages it, overseeing its use by everyone from film companies and fashion magazines doing shoots to artists staging exhibitions and an organisation called Living Dinners, which puts on pop-up dining experiences. In the past, Kevin managed old houses for a former dancer at Dublin's Royal Theatre named Marie, who had married a wealthy man, Ivor Underwood, and bought up big in property. The likes of Yoko Ono would come to see the houses when in town, he tells us. This sort of thing can give you delusions of grandeur, he admits.
Kevin is as enthusiastic a guide as he is a custodian. He explains that each of the homes on Henrietta Street would have had two staircases originally - a grand one to impress guests and a more modest, everyday affair. An idea is triggered: "Let's go visit the nuns!" He leads us across the road to the top of the street and a building occupied by the Daughters of Charity, who run community services from a couple of the old houses, which they have renovated. They have a very fine staircase indeed.
Further down the street, Kevin's keen for us to see inside another of the houses. We ambush the caretaker at No. 7. He is not expecting us but kindly consents to give a short history of the building and tells us about its current use, as artists' studios. Unlike the restored cleanliness of the nuns' building, this house has a ramshackle majesty, the paint peeling in chunks from the walls, a cheap paper lantern suspended from the ceiling where a grand chandelier would have once hung.
The interior at No. 12 is not dissimilar, as we learn when Kevin gives us a quick peek, tiptoeing around the group shooting an advertisement. It's dim and atmospheric, with high ceilings and creaking wooden floors. I wouldn't like to be here alone at night. Kevin shows us the items he has bought at auction to decorate - battered antiques, old china, bits of religious iconography - and points out where the walls are heavily pitted with holes from where tenement families hung nails to store their possessions. "It's a labour of love," he says of his job.
Meeting people such as Kevin is one of the great pleasures of travel. But getting an introduction to locals with an interesting story to tell is often easier said than done when you arrive in a city knowing no one. Our encounter today has been arranged by Le Cool Dublin, a free weekly online magazine which runs offbeat walking tours of the city. Our Le Cool guide for the morning, Irene O'Brien, tells us the tours are designed to provide a snapshot of the city on that particular day. Stops derive from what's happening around the city - they could vary from meeting the director of a new show to a visit to a traditional gentleman's tailor.
"You need a sense of adventure and a go-with-the-flow attitude to go on the tours as it's a complete surprise," Irene says. "We never do the same tour twice. It's more like having a friend show you around."
When she's not working with Le Cool, Irene is a fashion stylist with a penchant for vintage clothing. The latter has experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years in Ireland as the financial hardships of the recession have forced many people to rediscover the virtues of thrift and a mend-and-make-do mentality.
This is very much the spirit behind our next stop on the tour. Granby Park is a pop-up park occupying the site of an old housing estate which was knocked down to make way for a regeneration project that ultimately failed due to the recession. The site was sitting vacant and a group of young Dubliners operating under the name Upstart decided to work with the city council to make something of it.
When we visit, the park is coming towards the end of its one-month opening period and we're met by Sam Bishop, an articulate young architect who is one of the founders of Upstart. He's keen to stress the collective nature of the endeavour as he shows us around what they have created with the help of volunteers using upcycled, donated, recycled and found materials - everything from a play area for children and a cafe to a so-called "trade school", where people can barter to learn anything from photography or knitting to yoga or Spanish. There are numerous art installations. One which catches my eye is a display of old shoes, planted with flowers and arranged on a wall, which was apparently created by teenagers from a neighbouring housing estate. There's also a sizeable amphitheatre made from 1300 wooden transportation palettes. It's called the DubFast Theatre and has a special symbolism, having been constructed with the help of teens from the local area and from Belfast.
"We look at vacant sites as venues for creativity at a time when a lot of creatives are leaving the country," Sam explains. "We wanted to show what's possible on these kinds of sites."
The project has proved extremely popular with the local community and has been packed out in the evenings and on weekends for events such as movie screenings, live music, poetry readings and theatrical performances. Given its popularity, and the efforts expended on its construction, it must be tempting to keep the park going on a more permanent basis. But Sam says Upstart is focused on enabling other communities in Ireland to create similar projects of their own. They're putting together a toolkit and plan to present workshops around the country to show others how to get these kinds of projects up and running. It's all about finding new ways of creating value for communities, Sam says.
It's an approach that resonates in Dublin where, it seems, the hardships of the recession have prompted many locals to re-evaluate and reconnect with their community. As we walk to our next stop, Irene tells us about the Light House, an independent cinema that was forced to close following the property crash of 2011. Locals rallied around and it was able to reopen the following year.
"People are realising there is power in numbers," she says. "That's one of the good things to come of the recession."
We arrive then at Usher's Island, which is not in fact an island but one of the roads running alongside the River Liffey upstream from Temple Bar. We are visiting the James Joyce House and our host, Brendan Kilty, is anxiously awaiting our arrival.
Ushering us up the front steps and inside, Brendan explains that the house once belonged to Joyce's aunts. It is, he tells us, the "dark, gaunt house" of one of Joyce's most famous short stories, The Dead, which is included in his volume Dubliners and takes place at an Epiphany party in 1904 hosted by a pair of elderly ladies. Periodically, Brendan stages recreations of the meal served in the story, with a mouth-watering menu that includes roast goose, spiced beef and hot floury potatoes followed by jelly and plum pudding. He says he puts on these meals "whenever I get a figary, whenever I feel like it" - in practice, a couple of times a month. The house also hosts a range of other events, including theatrical adaptations of The Dead. (There's a 1987 movie adaptation, directed by John Hudson, which Brendan likes to describe as "a thinking man's Blues Brothers".)
Brendan leads us upstairs to the dining room, where we're treated to home-baked cakes and tea served in front of a roaring fire. As we eat, he tells us how he first visited the house in 1979 as a student, having never read any of Joyce's books. The house was derelict but Brendan had an epiphany - one day, he knew, he would own this property.
Many years later, in the late 90s, one of Joyce's childhood homes was illegally demolished. Brendan had become a Joyce fan in the intervening years, in-between establishing himself as a barrister (he's also been involved with the campaign for an Australian Bill of Rights), and was outraged. He bought the rubble from the illegally demolished house to stop it ending up in the rubbish tip and gives out pieces to be incorporated into park benches around the world. There's one in the forecourt of the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne and another in Toowoomba.
Brendan finally bought the house of The Dead, where we now sit, in January 2000. "If you're alone in this house you will always feel the presence of others," he tells us. His ethos is to conserve the house and to share it with others. He remains full of ideas and enthusiasm for the project; his latest initiative was buying an old-fashioned letterpress on which he plans to produce a limited edition of The Dead in the house's basement.
Our final stop on the Le Cool tour is in the city centre, at the offices of the Dublin Fringe Festival in Temple Bar. Here, we head to the top floor to meet Roise Goan, the festival's outgoing director, along with incoming director Kris Nelson and Joey Cavanagh, who is directing a play in this year's festival.
Like fringe festivals around the world, the focus at the Dublin Fringe is on the cutting edge, primarily in theatre and dance but also comedy, music and more - "what's new, what's next," Roise explains. But unlike most other fringe festivals, which tend to have an open-access policy (meaning anyone can apply to perform), the Dublin Fringe is wholly curated. Around 40,000 people come to watch every year, approximately 20 to 30 per cent of them from overseas, often combining a visit to the fringe with other events in Dublin's festival season of September and October, when theatre, book, fashion and dance festivals also run.
The Fringe Festival also runs Fringe Lab, a year-round program to support artists such as Joey. He turned his hand to writing and directing after studying actuarial finance - "It wasn't for me," he says of the latter with some understatement - and has previously been involved in running the festival's box office. His play on the 2013 program, Whelp, is about the growing phenomenon of young Irish people having to move back in with their parents as they struggle in the post-recession economy.
"The festival is an interesting mix of very personal work that's very authentic and then very ambitious works that take over the whole city," says Kris, who is from Montreal, one of the world's great festival cities. "This model doesn't exist anywhere else."
If our morning has been a snapshot of Dublin on this day, it hints at a broader picture of the city that is very exciting indeed.
Gemma Nisbet was a guest of Tourism Ireland.
FACT FILE
Le Cool walking tours cost €15 ($22). lecool.com/dublin.
Granby Park is now closed but for information on Upstart, see upstart.ie.
For details on upcoming events at James Joyce House, visit jamesjoycehouse.org.
The Dublin Fringe Festival is held in September each year. fringefest.com.
For information about visiting Dublin and Ireland, go to ireland.com.
