A rotund woman drops a vast black plastic sack off her shoulder, tipping its contents onto the pavement. Old cardigans, shirts, trousers, sweaters spill out in chaotic heaps. Other women quickly gather round examining them with the intent look of serious bargain hunters. The Hill brings a different perspective to the phrase down-market. A Corporation clean-up has now made it less anarchic, but for decades even the word ‘market’ seemed ill-chosen, implying organisation and regulation, neither of which were much in evidence. Turning right off O’Connell Street early on a Saturday morning at the Gresham Hotel into Sean MacDermott Street then left on to the sloping Upper Cumberland Street North, you arrive in the mecca of absolute junk. Until recently, traders arrived late on Friday night to claim the best spots with travellers, duvets clasped around them against the cold, and other junk dealers jostling for space. After locals complained about overnight noise, lines were painted on the pavement defining sales pitches, with gardai maintaining order. Once a purely Dub affair, the Hill now reflects recent inner-city upheavals. Perhaps half its customers are Russians, Romanians, Africans, and Chinese living nearby, with a sprinkling of bearded Islamic refugees. The Hill brings a feeling of affluence to people who can’t afford to shop anywhere else. Attics across town are stuffed with rubbish bought on a whim here before breakfast: a computer monitor, a microscope, a desk lamp, and an old Singer sewing machine that all looked as if they might work. The best items are usually gone by 8.30 am. Kitchen utensils, ragged primary school books, and toys, mingle with televisions, woodworm-ridden furniture, typewriters missing keys, even dentist’s drills. Occasionally things work: a 78 record player, a lawn mower, or an almost new stereo. A food stall offers rusty tins of stew, cooking oil diverted from Dunnes, cakes of uncertain age, and fresh bananas. Though tiny, its trade in books draws endless browsers for the odd Dickens, obsolete legal and medical texts, ancient and modern clerical tomes from a dusty Theologia Moralis to the paperback, Prayer without Frills, testaments to religious decline. Precious literary reputations have no place here; for years thick books all sold for 20p, thin ones for 10p. More discerning buyers find Arklow china, solid irons, and fine old frames from damaged holy pictures. Now and then there is real drama. A few years ago a dealer was almost lynched. When a shaven-headed boy of maybe nine, tried to rob a wad of notes from his jacket pocket he hurled a heavy metal object after him, only to hit another entirely innocent boy, who bled profusely. Women screamed ‘Ye bastard!’ and the crowd moved in ominously on the trader. Then an older local woman intervened and tensions eased. Lead roles belong to established traders. For years, a solidly-built Midlands traveller with a head like a well-rounded boulder cheerily greeted one and all as his energetic sons delayed the traffic while cutting rolls of carpet and lino. The bonhomie was hereditary; younger offspring would look up disarmingly at a tall customer and ask ‘How many feet are ye ?’ One well-fed Dub had a sales patter strong on self-parody. ‘Come on down, the price is right !’ he bellowed raucously. When two small seats drew a prospective customer he declared ‘Real Phoenix Park chairs, missus. I robbed ‘em meself when I was four.’ Not all are as engaging. Exhausted mothers swear obscenities at unmanageable children. Teenagers selling suspiciously cheap bikes prompted garda raids. Another ‘trader’ would yell ‘Howya Sergeant’ as the law approached. A wiry pensioner told an English photographer that ‘There was a young fella here once with a camera. He got a box in the mouth. Just thought I’d tell ye....’ Locals say the Hill began as ‘The Togger,’ an old clothes market where mothers got kids ‘togged out’. Others knew it as ‘The Stones’ - goods were displayed laid flat on the cobble setts. Dealers procured stock in mainly cashless door-to-door transactions, exchanging delph for unwanted clothing. There are still at least three dealers most weeks selling second-hand adult and children’s shoes in neatly-arranged rows. Trade diversified later with an influx of travellers in the 1960s. Today’s Hill market is a living link with an era of poverty-stricken tenements, brothels, VD and unlicensed beer-houses in Monto, the once-notorious slum1 in this neighbourhood. Despite periodic Victorian clean-up attempts (the Legion of Mary tried again in the 1920s, pinning holy pictures to brothel doors), prostitution and illicit late drinking thrived on Dublin’s large British military presence following the Crimean War.2 By the 1880s, Monto had sunk from a respectable Georgian residential and commercial area into infamy, despite name changes aimed at restoring its reputation.3 Street-guides featured such estate agents’ nightmares as ‘Cutpurse Alley’, ‘Murdering Lane’, and ‘Dunghill Lane’. Montgomery Street, source of the area’s nickname, is now Foley Street near Connolly Station. Hill visitors today might take careful note of Cumberland Street’s own former identity: ‘Cut-Throat Lane.’4 Alan Murdoch is a freelance journalist based in Dublin. 1 Life among Monto’s brothels and pawnshops is vividly recalled by former residents in K Kearns (ed.) Dublin Tenement Life, An Oral History (Dublin 1994). Old clothes’ markets also operated in Patrick Street and in the Iveagh Market in Francis Street, while a clothes recovery trade, recycling old wool for upholstery, was based in the Coombe. 2 J V O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, A City in Distress, 1899-1916 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982), pp.190-191. O’Brien notes that 8,271 women who came before the courts in Dublin in 1870 were judged to be prostitutes, while parallel figures for any major English city did not exceed 6,000. He attributes falling vice arrests in the early 1890s as much to new female employment in factories and clerical work as official suppression of brothels. 3 P Somerville-Large, Dublin (London 1979), pp.270-273. 4 J V O’Brien (as note 2) p.28.