Old pictures of Dublin

Some houses have been altered beyond recognition of course…

By contrast, the house next door is the only one left in the whole development with its original windows. These are of the plainer of the two designs used in the scheme, but are refined nonetheless. Lovely original slating too.

Sadly, the fabulous swan neck lamppost in the original picture (that model always made for the most spectacular silhouette in black and white photographs) no longer survives, but one does cling on for dear life in an expectedly altered state at the entrance to the ‘parade’ at the junction with North King Street.

Clearly it hasn’t been painted since the 1920s either.

This housing scheme is not, as is to be expected, a Corporation housing development per se, but rather one built by a so-called ‘public utility society’, a commonplace form of housing enterprise in the early years of the 20th century. Ruth McManus explains their operation very well, with the societies effectively operating as property development agencies through the construction of small and medium-scale housing schemes which catered for the ‘lower end’ of the housing market. In theory they were to have philanthropic aims, and by and large they did simply by definition of the modest type of dwellings that they built, usually adjacent to Corporation housing and on land provided by the Corporation with accompanying reduced rates. But like the Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company, at the end of the day these societies provided housing for those who were not in most need of being re-housed, with the desperately poor still living in tenement conditions and awaiting the direct intervention of publically-subsidised mass housing in the city centre and new outlying suburbs.

However, the societies – as with the Linenhall Public Utility Society which built the 63 houses pictured above – helped to significantly reduce the housing shortage of the 1920s and 1930s, and thus were viewed favourably by local authorities and ultimately by legislation in accommodating their endeavours.

The rendered plaque to the Linenhall Society still remains, well presented, on the central end house in the scheme.

The building jutting into the right of the original picture is a curious semi-industrial building of c. 1910 date, built at a remove from the earlier houses on the street in what was probably wasteland at the time.

@foremanjoe wrote:

Hang on, might I be thinking of Patrick or Michael Scott?

Their profiles on this website state that they were heavily involved with CIE and had a hand in creating their corporate identity and colour schemes?

http://www.irish-architecture.com/architects_ireland/scottp.html

http://www.irish-architecture.com/architects_ireland/michael_scott/cie.html

Patrick Scott was involved with the logo design ok.
However their involvement with CIE was long over when the buses changed from the two tone dark blue scheme to that orange shade.

@Morlan wrote:

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/9203/animatedgif.gif

Actually, I probably shouldn’t have put a 4meg file in the thread! So Paul if you want to make it a link, that’d be great – I can’t edit it.

Amazing stuff GrahmH. Heartbreaking to look at the change. It’s shocking how the integrity of a place can be butchered with only a few changes.

I wonder if you could be persuaded to try your hand at more LIFE recreation photos. There great.

Morlan: that animated gif is real spooky. Has a post Neutron bomb kinda feel.

Precisely.

Agree with StephenC. Catch it before it closes in October.

If ever you go to Dublin town, is an exhibition of evocative photographs by Elinor Wiltshire chronicling Dubliners as they worked, played, shopped and prayed during the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition title If ever you go to Dublin town takes its name from a poem of the same name by Patrick Kavanagh, who, along with other literary figures, including Flann O’Brien, was a friend and neighbour of Elinor Wiltshire.

Born in Limerick, Elinor Wiltshire (nee O’Brien) founded the Green Studios on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, with her husband Reginald Wiltshire in the 1950s. Over a period of about fifteen years, using a Rolleiflex camera which she acquired in 1955, Elinor Wiltshire captured images of a changing city and its people. The Rolleiflex camera was held at waist level and the scenes or images to be captured were viewed through a 6x6cm ground-glass screen. As a result, many of those featured in the portraits in the exhibition were completely unaware that a camera was trained on them – hence the natural and uninhibited manner in which they are depicted.

The near perfect composition in many of her photographs reveals an artist’s eye for the beauty that exists in everyday life – shoppers in Cumberland Street’s busy second-hand market; summer outings on Sandymount Strand; exuberant scenes of All Ireland Football Finals fans at railway stations; Corpus Christi processions through the city of Dublin. Also chronicled are significant social changes in the Inner City, as reflected in the anxiety shown on the faces of residents facing eviction and relocation from tenement buildings in York Street, off St Stephen’s Green, to new areas such as Ballymun.

Her photographs were not just about Dublin city, however. Some of the most important images record the life of Traveller families at a time of great change in Ireland. Her photographs of an encampment in County Cork, as families prepared for the Cahirmee Horse Fair, are remarkable, as are those she took of the Sheridan/O’Brien campsite in Loughrea, Co Galway.

Her husband Reginald’s death in 1968 led to the sale of the business and brought an end to her series of Dublin photographs. Following a visit to Ethiopia in 1971, she moved to London, where she now works as a botanist and researcher at the Natural History Museum.

In total the Wiltshire Photographic Collection numbers some 1,000 negatives and 300 prints. It was acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 1994 and images from the collection were first exhibited by the Archive in 1999.

Bovril? Or Don and Nelly flipping neon sausages into a frying pan for Donnelly’s? …mmm… Tasty even now, after all the years!

@litirte wrote:

I don’t remember the Donnelly’s neon sign. That’s one I would have remembered. Where was that located?

D’Olier Street just as you entered the street from O’Connell Bridge, though it was visible for quite a distance. A lady tossed a sausage from a pan, it went across the building (the sausage not the pan 🙂 and became impaled on a fork held by a man.

Thanks, guys. Times Square it’s not but our expectations were much lower back then!

I’d love to see the Christmas lights on McBirney’s of Aston Quay in the ’50s. People used to travel miles to see that one.