New museum to capture tenement life in Dublin city

DUBLIN City Council has opened a new museum that provides a unique urban social history insight to tenement life in the capital. 

Tenement Museum Dublin, situated at Number 14 Henrietta Street, showcases the daily life of the north inner city from 1877 to the late 1970s when it was a tenement building. 

It also features restored rooms on the basement and ground floors that illustrate what life would have been like during that period. 

The museum relays the social institutional and family histories of Dublin’s tenement population during the 20th century, through a variety of media, including immersive drama, guided tour and audio tour.  

Visitors will encounter exhibition films, soundscapes, and creative interpretative audio narratives covering childhood experiences, domestic routines, working life, the role of mother, military affiliations, questions of health and recreation as part of tenement life in Dublin throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. 

Oral history recordings of people who once lived in the tenements were captured as part of an oral history project, where memories were recorded of people who lived in Henrietta Street tenements during the second half of the 20th century.

To mark the occasion, a specially commissioned play by ANU Productions, ‘HENTOWN’, will run until October 1 in the museum. 

‘HENTOWN’ is set in 1963 and explores the immediate aftermath in one house on Henrietta Street, following the collapse of two tenements in Dublin City. Tickets are €15 and can be purchased at www.tenementmuseum.ie.

Meanwhile, the museum will open to the public in late October for an initial four days per week, Thursday to Sunday, with guided tours of the museum available.

Visitors will walk the house over three floors and explore the tenement history of Dublin through universal themes of home, community and social traditions, work, housing, street life and play, and suburban Dublin while experiencing and interacting with rooms recreated from different time periods.

Speaking at the launch, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mícheál Mac Donncha, said: “I want to congratulate Dublin City Council on this project which has taken over 10 years to bring to fruition. The extensive conservation and refurbishment work that has been carried out has returned this magnificent building to the people of Dublin. 

“Both they and visitors alike can now experience this unique social history museum, the design of which has been guided by conversations with former residents.”