This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

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Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.