Read my story about the return of the Bram Stoker commemorative plaque in today’s Irish Times here. (Scroll beyond Tony Clayton-Lee’s article.)

Find out more about the plaque’s disappearance: my Guardian article from 2010 here and previous blogposts here and here.

Stoker plaque at 30 Kildare Street. Photo by Warren Whitney.

Dr Albert Power, of the Bram Stoker Society writes:

‘On Tuesday 17th I drove specially into the city to check for myself, and – yes, there it was! [...] There’s no doubt that it’s the original plaque and not a replacement. The most recent photograph of it I had seen was John Moore’s from May 2008, when it had been coloured brown: it was blue back in 1983. Furthermore, upon close examination there looks like to be a faint shading or patina along its inner rim, which would suggest storage in a damp place or having been secreted under something which had left an impression. It also looked to me that it was hung ever so slightly askew. [...] It’s quite a while, to the best of my knowledge, since any of us did anything about this, and I for one had regarded the battle (with much sadness) as lost. Maybe the cumulative effect of all these efforts took its intended toll.

30 Kildare Street before the reinstatement of the plaque

This is how it begins:

‘On a frosty morning at the end of last November, I set out from my parents’ house to walk around the edges of Tallaght: it was the day the government was due to announce cuts ahead of yet another emergency budget, but I wasn’t much in the mood to pay attention to the news. The idea was to try to stitch together my memories of the places I knew with less familiar areas. I also wanted to see if this far-flung zone was still traversable by foot – seeing it by car would not suffice, and anyway I can’t drive.’

Continue Reading here.

I’ll be discussing perceptions of the city, especially of Dublin. I’ll also discuss the walk I undertook around Tallaght back in November, about which I’ve written an essay (to be published soon).

Other speakers at the event: Andrew Hetherington, Co-Founder of Fund It, and Pat Cooke, from the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD.

To round it all off, there’ll be a roundtable session about funding and the future of the arts in Ireland.

The Beatles, for whom international air travel became a commonplace during the height of their fame, wrote their song, ‘Back in the USSR’ about a BOAC flight from the USA to the USSR. This was partially a tribute to the Beach Boys song ‘California Girls’, but for the most part was based on Chuck Berry’s song ‘Back in the USA’, a 1959 composition where he sings, as his jet comes in to land, of how much he missed the highways and skyscrapers of America.

Cadillac Coupe de Ville, 1950

The thing is, Chuck Berry didn’t really write about going places by plane; he was mostly concerned with getting back to his beloved America, with its drive-ins and jukeboxes; his subjects were always about having cars and girls – or getting more cars and girls. (One lyric painstakingly documents Chuck’s attempt at trading in his ‘broken-down raggedy Ford’ for a ‘yellow convertible four-door’ Cadillac Coupe de Ville; he even goes as far as specifying the kind of insurance cover he requires for his new vehicle.)

His obsessions weighed heavily upon his real life too: in 1959 he was arrested under the Mann Act – which banned the interstate transport of females for ‘immoral purposes’ – for an incident involving a 14 year old girl he had brought from Mexico to work in his nightclub in St. Louis. Berry vehemently denied the charges, but was sentenced to five years for the incident, and wrote some of his best songs while incarcerated. He was released from prison at the end of 1963, and a subsequent single, ‘No Particular Place To Go,’ was an instant hit, getting to number ten in the Billboard Hot 100.

Berry’s songs were forged in an era when the rhythm and blues of black musicians was being reshaped into the rough and ready melodic form that became known as rock and roll. Berry was signed to Chess Records in Chicago, a renowned blues label that recorded artists such as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Although Chuck Berry has been called one of the originators of rock and roll, it is hard to place when exactly it began, but there is much agreement that it started with a single record.

The record is called ‘Rocket 88’, and it was recorded in March 1951 by two rock and roll legends: Ike Turner and Sam Phillips. Accounts differ as to which was the actual day of recording, but many historians agree that the melding of distorted guitar and galloping drums with twelve-bar blues was the beginning of something bigger.

Ike Turner would later record classic tracks with his wife Tina, such as ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘Nutbush City Limits’; Sam Phillips was the man behind Sun Studios, run out of a small corner unit on a street in Memphis, Tennessee. Phillips would later discover the young Elvis Presley, and produce his early records.

‘Rocket 88’ was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, but was actually performed by Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston was the band’s saxophonist who added his urgent plaintive vocals to the track. Ike Turner played piano on the song, coming up with a staccato introduction that would later be lifted note-for-note by Little Richard for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.

Like many of Berry’s compositions, the song was effectively a hymn to a car: in this case the Oldsmobile ‘Rocket’ 88, a model that had only recently gone into production, at the end of the 1940s. Driven by a powerful engine, it was fast and efficient – the song praises the Oldsmobile’s ‘V-8 motor’ and its ‘modern design,’ contrasting it with rickety old ‘jalopies… and the sound they make’.

The song had been recorded for Chess Records by Sam Phillips, who worked out of the studio he had built the year before in a converted radiator shop at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. The premises was so small there was no room for an office, and he had to conduct business in Miss Taylor’s Restaurant next door (usually at the ‘third booth by the window’, Phillips told writer Peter Guralnick).

Rock and roll went on to become a multi-million dollar industry, and some of the originators felt, inevitably, that they never got what they thought due to them. Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for what turned out to be a derisory sum, but made money elsewhere with some canny investments. Ike Turner felt demonised for his mistreatment of Tina, and in his later years (he died in December 2007) he found refuge in his status as one of the founders of rock and roll. But Chuck Berry is still on the road, keeping it rolling, not behind the wheel of a Cadillac, but by short-haul flight.

Rocket 88 – Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats by dumbriffs

“It seems I’m happier writing away from, rather than towards, something. I arrived here at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and therefore into an awful lot of smugness, which didn’t mix well with the country’s inherent parochialism and insularity. The smugness seems well and truly smashed now… A lot of the poetry written in Ireland appears far too preoccupied with the idea of ‘Ireland’. It places huge emphasis on place in rather territorial terms. And there’s generally an aversion to experimentalism. Poetry that uses ‘unpoetic’ language or plays around with convention is looked upon (at best) as an entertaining oddity. With few – but striking – exceptions, the ‘scene’ is dominated by a small number of established organisations which have an interest in maintaining the status quo.”

From an interview with SJ Fowler in 3:AM Magazine here.

Often, when walking near the markets buildings, I would stop and think about what they were like in their heyday, when surely they were busier than they are now: were the narrow corridors between fruit and vegetable stands constantly thronged by customers coming and going? Were the streets outside full to bursting with carts and carriages?

A lot of nineteeth century architecture in the central city forces me to think this way: what was it like back when it really mattered? Of course, this might just be a nostalgic projection provided by my own wishing that Dublin must have been relevant at some point in the past. The former Irish Parliament building on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, was an illusory centre of Irish political life in the nineteenth century – the real power being vested in the Westminster parliament in London. It was an empty centre: Ireland was then a peripheral part of the British Empire, and now stands on the edge of Europe, both geographically and in terms of its political relevance to the wider European Union.

But what can you make of the psychological effect of this emptiness at the core, instituted perhaps by the shadow-puppetry of colonial assuagement, but nonetheless preserved meticulously, unthinkingly, right up to the present day? One aspect: an enduring scepticism about the real worth of institutions combined with a compulsive habit of tipping one’s hat to power, in the absence of anything else to do with one’s hat. Governmental, media [insert the name of the state broadcaster and major national newspaper you are currently thinking of here]: any institution gets it in the neck verbally, but no one knows what to do in order to occasion any tangible change. The net result: no change of any substance. This is the kind of impotence that makes Dublin, and Ireland in general, a circle of hell for anyone inclined to interrogate it in this way. Better to keep your head in the sand. Better, indeed, to get on with the business of living: commute expensively, accumulate, keep your taxes low and your house prices high; pave; re-tile; repeat ad nauseam.

Living in the centre of the city is both heaven and hell. Preferring the latter, I attempted to investigate the infernal underground workings of the area, drawn to the gloomy inky-dark streets of the south inner city. I lived just off a road called Blackpitts – its name a reference to the filthy puddles left by the River Poddle when its flow abated during the summer months. The street is built directly over the course of the river. I often wondered whether ‘Filthy Puddle’ wouldn’t be a better translation of Dubh Linn, one which would undoubtedly lend the city’s name a subversive undertow. Blackpitts is tucked to the west of Clanbrassil Street, down a short incline that hints at the presence of the river: the slopes on either side of Blackpitts are the valley, and the street itself is a substitute for the subterranean river that runs below.

Blackpitts is the gateway to a dense warren of streets packed with terraced houses and small factories, under all of which a complex network of man-made rivers runs. The houses date from different points over the last hundred or so years: the redbrick terraces grouped around Hammond and St John’s streets (this area was where I lived for a few years) are from the last years of the nineteenth century, and are the product of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company, who also built the terraces in Stoneybatter. Just behind the redbricks off Blackpitts is the area known as the Tenters, named after the ‘tents’ of flax fibres stretched out to dry on frames across the fields in the days when weavers were based in the locality. Houses were built here in the 1920s.

But it wasn’t just the history of the area around Blackpitts that interested me. Desirable as a place to live because of its proximity to the city centre, it was targeted in a serious way for redevelopment. It was an area that was far from settled: on a daily basis you could trace the changes as your footsteps drew you towards long-deserted warehouses, past fenced-off tracts of waste ground from which an old building had recently been cleared.

While the boom years made Dublin a site of constant flux in terms of property development, nowhere was the tension between construction and destruction more obvious to me than in the area where I lived. One day, as I walked down the street, a row of redbrick houses were being knocked down, brick-by-brick. I had previously thought the houses to be occupied – there were bicycles chained to the railings outside, and they otherwise showed no more signs of neglect than did my own residence. Half-knocked now, the lower floors of their front facade stood, sawn off just at the sill of the upstairs window, a spooky reminder of what was yet to be erased completely. The clinical precision with which the operation was being carried out made the top of the wall seem as sharp as a razor’s edge, when glimpsed in silhouette against the dull afternoon sky.

At the end of Blackpitts is Newmarket Square, an immense windswept plateau bordered by anonymous redbrick warehouses used by multinationals for document storage, and, at the western end, a cluttered and uncomfortable looking apartment development. A shuttered pub, Grey’s of Newmarket, stands at the north centre, on a corner where a road opens onto the new Cork Street extension. This pub was the scene of a gangland killing in 2004, and is one of a number of pubs that have been shut down in the Liberties area.

At number 48 Newmarket Square was a rooming house where Lily O’Neill, a young woman known as Honor Bright, lived; she was murdered in 1925, her body found on a quiet mountain road to the south of the city. Working as a prostitute, Lily made her way from her lodgings on the night of her murder along New Row, past St Patrick’s Cathedral towards Bishop Street, and onwards towards St Stephen’s Green. That walk was less than a mile, but it bridged two sharply contrasting worlds.

One of the streets she walked down, New Row, had also been built over the Poddle river – an early version of the streetname was New Row-on-Poddle. The point where the street meets the western end of the Coombe also marks the confluence of two different branches of the river, where the network of streams rejoins the Poddle proper. This is where George Sala, on an assignment in 1853 for Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine, had found ‘semi-continental picturesqueness’ amongst the dirt and poverty of the Coombe’s inhabitants.

Tracking the different branches of the Poddle could occupy someone for weeks. For a while I became obsessed with tracking it, believing that an unlovely, unloved and largely hidden river was more valuable than those more celebrated watercourses: the Seine, the Thames, even the Liffey. I believed that its very insignificance held the key to its significance. That it was banished from sight as a result of its unholy stench made it even more intriguing. Yet it also emerged above ground briefly in the oddest places.

One day, I went a few steps from my house, and tried to find an exposed stretch of the river that appeared on maps of the area. In the grounds of Warrenmount Convent, I asked a groundskeeper about the river, and he brought me to the point where it had appeared on the map. A forbidding stone wall of at least ten feet in height, marking the extent of the convent’s grounds, stopped me in my tracks. There was no sign of the river within the boundary of the convent.

However, when I stopped and listened, I could hear the unmistakeable burbling of water, and I decided that it must be coming from the other side of the wall.

On the other side of the wall was a yard, used as a car-park by an Irish telephone company. As I walked onto the property, a guard emerged from his office, and told me I couldn’t continue my trespassing. I explained my reasons for being there, and eventually he relented, and pointed me towards the far corner of the car-park, where the gravel surface broke into scrubby waste-ground, and where there stood a couple of trees, which must have been 100 or so years old.

There, flowing freely along the other side of the convent wall, I found the Poddle – or, at least, one of its branches – and after a couple of minutes spent admiring it, I walked away satisfied, and the river disappeared from view once again.

It’s hard to believe how important Tallaght was to the historical development of Dublin city – at least it was hard to believe something like that when I grew up there. Nowhere seemed further from the dense, decaying streets of the city centre in the 1980s than Tallaght, with its vast and oppressive open spaces threaded with sinister-looking electricity pylons that you could hear a low buzz from when you stood beneath them. Tallaght, with its anonymous industrial estates seemingly dropped in the centre of housing developments – estates that, in turn, seemed to stretch for miles without end. Tallaght seemed like nowhere.

Tallaght never seemed part of Dublin, to me. It was distantly flung to the far south-western corner of the city, as if banished from the urban centre for some obscure crime. It was divided from Walkinstown by a large tract of farmland that subsequently, much later, became a park and a motorway. The road from Tallaght to the city – at least the one I was most familiar with – was the Greenhills Road, which runs along a high embankment between Kilnamanagh, where my family lived, and the roundabout at Walkinstown. As you travel north along the road, factories and warehouses stretch out below you to the left, as far as the eye can see. In the distance you can just about see the white papal cross in the Phoenix Park, but, at least from that perspective, that’s the nearest visible green space.

On our bus trips to the city – usually me, my brother and mother, on a 77 bus whose upstairs windows tasted of tobacco smoke when, one rainy day, I wiped my hand on the fogged glass, then licked it – you’d be introduced to the oddly fractured urban planning at work in the city, before reaching the snug terraced streets of the Liberties, the bus taking a sharp hairpin turn at the end of Cork Street before catapulting around the corner down the Coombe, past the disembodied doorway to the old hospital, preserved like an old limb in formaldehyde. Across from St Patrick’s Cathedral, a Dublin Corporation rubbish tip, where street cleaners dumped the refuse they collected along the city’s streets. The inner city intrigued me: it seemed everything Tallaght wasn’t.

Only later did I find out that Tallaght was flung there on purpose. Or at least part of it was. The extensive council estates located to the west of the village were, in part, the city’s response to a long-overdue need for proper social housing to allay the slum conditions in the inner city. Other building followed, as empty landscapes filled up with housing built by private developers on acres of rezoned land.

In the mid-60s, a master plan had proposed the development of a number of new towns in the west of the city, of which Tallaght was one. This expansion formed the western suburbs as they now stand, kept outside the city proper by the boundary of the M50 motorway, which serves as a link between suburbs, and to the roads out of the city.

When the M50 was being built, I still lived in Tallaght, and, before they had laid the road surface, I used to ride my BMX along the flattened earth of the motorway, as far, nearly, as the current interchange in the shadow of the quarry at Firhouse. At that point, there was an urban legend that a local gangster had buried a bag full of money from a robbery somewhere under the road. I cycled along, thinking about it: if you were to start digging, where would you begin? The roadworks were vast, and, by comparison, a bag full of stolen money seemed so small, no matter how much of it there was.

When they had put up a wall along the edge of the motorway, I was still drawn there – the strangeness of this incursion into everyday life had not yet abated. A small stream ran from the estate in Kilnamanagh under the M50. I was intrigued by the way a new concrete riverbed had been constructed to divert the river below the road, and I often pottered around there in the sunlight, watching the water trickle away into the darkness of a moulded cement tunnel. It was surrounded by a grubby scrubland pockmarked with spiky bushes and broken concrete blocks – the detritus of road-building. Discarded, presumably used, condoms could be seen here and there. The stream disappeared under the motorway, and I still don’t know where it emerges.

I went to school at the top of the Greenhills Road, near Tallaght village. Across the field – an open space, really, bordered on one side by an industrial estate, on the other by the Bancroft housing estate – was a small river that smelled like chemicals, but had a rich and intriguing history. The River Poddle had been Dublin’s first municipal water source, and ran from an unspecified source beyond the Belgard Road. It was spliced with a canal that drew water from the River Dodder further downstream, and supplied water to the city for many years. It had become notoriously polluted due to its path through teeming slum areas with virtually no sewage facilities, and had also been used for waste drainage by the tanneries in the Liberties, and, wisely perhaps, it had ceased to be used as a source of drinking water.

When you were out in the field, and you were a primary school child sweating in your uniform on a summer day, you smelled the river before you saw it. It ran down behind the cigarette factory that stood on the other side of the Greenhills Road, before running under the road and through a ditch that directed it eastwards towards Templeogue. The sweet smell of tobacco being rolled into cigarettes wafted across to the school most days – usually in the summer months when the windows were opened in an effort to cool the classrooms.

My abiding memories of Tallaght focus on how separate it seemed from the rest of Dublin. This was partially because of limited public transport, but it was also undeniably physically separate. It still is, to a large degree, thrown off to the edge of Dublin by some powerful centrifugal force.

Viewed on a map’s surface, as the city embraces the Irish Sea and lazily asses itself out towards Ireland’s midlands, Dublin appears curvy and welcoming, but, in person, it’s spiky and wants you to go fuck yourself. The Spire, a stainless steel needle that reached 400 feet into the air on O’Connell Street, is often nicknamed the Spike by those wishing it to stand humorously as a symbol of hard drug use in the inner city, but I prefer to think of it as a representation of the metallic, unyielding, non-stick attitude of Dublin and Dubliners in general. The city has an edge. As an additional point of comparison, it’s difficult to get a decent view of the Spire in the city centre. You can wander around the low-rise centre without ever seeing it at all; the same goes for Dublin. It’s simultaneously there and not there. For me, Dublin is still a great unknown, and I’ve lived here nearly all of my life.

This realisation led me to set myself tasks: would I be able to describe Dublin – not neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, and not necessarily through its history – in a way that reflected what I think I already know about it, while also acknowledging that there are things about a city that constantly change, that you know only briefly before they’re spirited away, and there are things that you may never know.

Dublin is a place I hate; Dublin is a place I love. Both feelings jostle around inside of me as I make my way around the city’s streets by foot, by bike, by bus. I’ve never committed to either love or to hate the city, but often I decide on a position, before changing my mind later. I never really thought I did love the city, but sometimes I find myself doing so, before stopping myself. Sometimes the late evening light catches a stubby Georgian street a certain way, and you’re transported briefly to a transcendental city, one where you haven’t just stepped in someone’s vomit.

Dublin, most of all, is a city of fragments. It’s been broken into pieces. These pieces are spread around the map, and often, no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to connect them all. Sometimes it’s impossible to connect any. This is partly a product of bad planning, partly because our minds rebel against the overwhelming experience of city life, and all we have left are fragments of urban experience to hang on to.

And this is the way I want to approach Dublin: through fragmentary glances down its streets and alleys, through midnight rambles in its industrial estates and exploratory hikes amongst its suburbs. Dublin is knowable through its fragments, or it’s not knowable at all.

In a way, all cities are the ruins of past civilizations, and Dublin is no different in this. The city, especially at its threadbare fringes and its sharp edges, testifies the recent death of a dream that consisted of full employment and house ownership for all. Incomplete developments that loom over country roads and adjoin supermarket car-parks concretize the optimism once felt about an ever-expanding property market, an optimism undermined by economic collapse. These estates are at times melancholy places, at times sites of a pioneer optimism. They are undoubtedly part of Dublin, but are also isolated fragments cast to the North, South and West of the city, thrown there by cheap land, the greased wheels of planning and good transportation links.

Dublin: pointy, sharp, steely, desperate, broken into pieces. Coming to a town near you, or it would be if you weren’t already there.