14 Henrietta Street

Henrietta Street was the first and grandest Georgian street in Dublin, laid out from the 1720s for the aristocracy and the higher clergy. Number 14 was built around 1748 for the Molesworth family. As power moved after the Act of Union, the street declined, and by the later nineteenth century the houses had been subdivided into tenements; at its most crowded, 14 Henrietta Street held around a hundred people in seventeen flats, families of eight or ten in a single room, with shared outdoor sanitation. The last residents left in 1979. The museum, opened in 2018, presents the house as it was left - stripped plaster, layered wallpaper, subdivided rooms - and tells the story through the oral testimony of people who actually lived in it, several of whom worked on the project. It is a guided tour of ninety minutes with limited numbers, and the tenement story is told without softening.

History

Henrietta Street was begun in the 1720s on land bought by Luke Gardiner, who built numbers 13, 14 and 15 in the late 1740s as a speculation, and the first occupant of number 14 was Lord Richard Molesworth. After the Act of Union in 1800 Dublin declined, the house was used by lawyers, courts and a barracks, and by 1877 the landlord Thomas Vance had removed its grand staircase and divided it into 17 tenement flats; it ceased to be a tenement in 1979 and opened as a museum in September 2018 (Wikipedia, 14 Henrietta Street).

What to look for

• The unrestored fabric - stripped plaster and layered wallpaper left as found.
• The subdivision - Georgian rooms partitioned into single-family tenement rooms.
• The oral testimony - former residents' recorded accounts through the tour.
• The arc - one house from 1748 mansion to 1979 tenement.

When to go

Any season; indoors. Guided tour only, ninety minutes, with small groups - book ahead, since walk-ins are frequently turned away. Closed some weekdays.

Good to know

Tour only, at fixed times, with limited capacity - booking is genuinely necessary. Stairs throughout with no lift. The material is grim and directly told. Closed on some weekdays.

Nearby

The King's Inns is at the end of the street; the Hugh Lane and Parnell Square are east.

Key facts