The museum at 14 Henrietta Street reflects the life of an inner-city Dublin house over 300 years, from its opulent heyday in the 18th century to its conversion into a tenement at the end of the 19th. The museum is the recipient of a 2026 Europa Nostra Award in the Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness-Raising category.
Henrietta Street was once the finest street in Dublin, built in the 1740s by one of the city’s most prodigious developers, Luke Gardiner, as a locus for high society, claret and conviviality. However, the fashionable northside of Dublin began to lose its allure when the 20th Earl of Kildare (later 1st Duke of Leinster) built his house on the southside of the River Liffey in 1745, now the seat of the Irish parliament. The Earl declared that fashion would follow him – and it did. Inner-city Dublin declined further after the Act of Union in 1801, when the Irish parliament moved to London, and the nobility moved with it. By the 1870s, 14 Henrietta Street had been divided into seventeen flats, and by 1911 there were over a hundred people living in the house, in overcrowded slum conditions.
Today the house is under the auspices of Dublin City Council Culture Company. The carefully conserved interior contains engaging interpretive material, while tenement spaces are dressed with period objects, all of which serves to reveal the social history of the property. Guided tours are designed to invite visitors to reflect and respond. For the museum’s oral-history programme, entitled ‘Your Tenement Memories’, hundreds of testimonies from former tenement residents have been collected. Workshops, schools programmes and public events take place throughout the year, including the Culture Club, which aims to engage people who may not feel at home in a museum setting.
Artists’ residencies in poetry, photography, textiles, lacemaking and printmaking have produced new works that now form part of this innovative museum’s collection and, in keeping with its mission, strengthened its links to the community.
Danielle O’Donovan.
