TD 1
SCRAP ARCHAEOLOGY We explore the afterlife of Dub
lin’s built environment and the custodians and repurposers of it. words Eanna Cunnane photos Johnny McMillan he ghosts of Dublin are everywhere. It’s been decades since the Council demolished the elegant crescent of terraces that faced St George’s Church on Hardwicke Place on the northside; though St. George’s surrounds were at least as significant and as beautiful as those of the Pepper Canister church on the Southside, almost nothing of them remains. But their ghosts are there, if you know where to look. Like a lot of the relics of Dublin’s built environment, they have an afterlife in another form, in another place. What happened to the interior of St George’s? It furnished what’s now the Oak on Parliament Street. That stack of seats in Mac’s warehouse in Islandbridge? They used to be the cinema stalls in the Stella in Rathmines. The water pouring from that filthy sluice gate near Grattan Bridge? It’s all that’s visible of the Poddle, which used to supply all of Dublin’s drinking water but now runs unseen underground beneath the city. If the afterlife of the built environment is difficult to appreciate, it’s partly because the vocabulary of creation is a large and familiar one. We know how the architecture, marketing and monetisation of new buildings works, and we know how to read what it tells us about the city we’re living in. We know that construction privileges some groups - right now, the investment funds that will own the almost entirely corporatised living spaces we’re currently building. But there are also lessons in how we treat the parts of the city we’re tearing down. The Iveagh Markets on Francis Street have been derelict for decades, but they’re protected because they appeal to our sense of how a historical building should look. The Tivoli theatre across the street is now demolished and all the art on its exterior walls erased. Even as recently as the 90s, Dublin’s urban fabric was threadbare, and photographer David Jazay’s pictures of the north quays and inner city around this time show empty lots and crumbling buildings everywhere. The last of those ruins are only now being razed, and there’s a parallel economy that’s repurposing and recirculating and sometimes even saving what we’re discarding. Things like the tenement museum on Henrietta street show that we’re gaining a better understanding of the interstitial history of Dublin’s decay and regeneration. But to fully appreciate the afterlife of the city, you need to understand the scrap economy. It’s an almost exclusively male world, operating largely unseen on building sites, in warehouses and in unglamorous parts of the city. But it’s as big a part of Dublin’s transformation as the cranes you can count on the skyline. 23