North Dublin’s Sandy Shore – 4

Leaving behind the Tolka River, the Main Road curves around Fairview Park. It’s a welcome stretch of greenery after the urban drear of North Strand. The park was reclaimed from tidal mudflats in the 1920s as the hinterland was being developed into suburbia. Tree lined walks are formally laid out, effectively masking off the railway line. Nearer the road, there’s a skatepark and a children’s playground. Beyond the tracks there are all weather pitches for Gaelic and Soccer.

Early on we pass a statue of Sean Russell. Russell was an IRA leader in the War of Independence, and fought against the Treaty in the Civil War. While the IRA diminished, Russell’s radicalism did not. He pursued the armed struggle until his death in 1940. He touted for arms and funding from the Soviet Union and subsequently Nazi Germany. From Germany he set out with Frank Ryan by U-boat, bound for Ireland as part of a sabotage mission. He died aboard and was buried at sea.

The memorial was erected in 1951 and has not proved popular with everyone. In 1954, the right arm, raised in unspecified salute was amputated by right, or left, wingers, depending. Next it was decapitated in 2004 by objectors citing Russell’s Nazi connections, condemning the latter’s systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Apologists claim Russell was no Nazi, and that he leaned towards Communist Russia betimes. A man of many hats, so. The accident prone statue was replaced with a sturdier bronze version. Russell stands, right hand advisedly held close to his side, his left clutching a hat; though precisely which hat is unsure. This hasn’t repelled further indignities. The plinth was gaily painted, quite literally, with the LGBT flag in 2020.

Further on, the main road joins with Fairview Strand, coming from our left. The area known as Fairview formed in the early nineteenth century. Though originally considered part of Ballybough, Poor Town, it was in fact more of a middle class enclave and also held a sizeable Jewish community. 

Marino College curves along with the roadway. This second level school, built in 1936 was designed by Robinson O’Keeffe, as a technical college. It is faced in granite and redbrick with metal framed windows. Its attractive, curved facade, recalls the style of the Art Deco period, when style and function rhymed. The complex includes a public library. The mansard roof is a later addition from the seventies, intended to harmonise with the more elegant mansards of the earlier buildings along the frontage.

The building of the church, Our Lady of Fairview, in mid century suggested a more pleasing name. In fact, the view over Dublin Bay from higher ground behind the foreshore had long been considered exceedingly fine. Presiding over it was the demesne of Lord Charlemont, and his grand Georgian residence, Marino House.

The fair view is perhaps less obvious now, the serrated scar of the docklands cutting across the serene complexion of the bay. A view still bracing to the modern, metropolitan soul, and beneath it, the palimpsest of heaven’s reflex endures. Marino House was built in 1753 for James Caulfield, the first Earl of Charlemont, and designed by Scottish architect, William Chambers. He also designed Charlemont House for the Earl in Parnell Square, the building which now houses Dublin’s Municipal Gallery, the Hugh Lane. A guiding impetus for the Marino project was the Grand Tour of Europe, a traditional rite of passage in the formation of the great and the good.The young Caulfield had been particularly engaged by the tour; nine years swanning around the Mediterranean, what’s not to like? On his return, the Bay of Naples, embedded in his memory, must have seemed magically projected on the horizon in the silhouette of the Dublin Mountains and Wicklow’s Sugarloaf Mountains. Milton’s Paradise Lost was another inspiration, suggesting a Garden of Eden for the aesthetically robust Earl back in his beloved home. Caulfield resolved to conjure up his own Xanadu from the higher ground of Marino. 

The Casino (meaning small house) was also designed by William Chambers as a garden pavilion for the big house. Something of a Georgian Tardis, the building looks compact from without, but it comprises three stories and is on a grande scale within. Built in 1770, it was truly a wonder of its day, but fell into decline when the estate was sold in 1881. The Irish State took ownership in the thirties, and it has been lovingly restored by the OPW. Today only the pavilion survives, Marino House being demolished in the 1920s to make way for the housing estate.

This was the first large local authority housing estate built in independent Ireland. It followed the principles of the Garden City Movement, which aimed for the perfect synthesis of urban and rural living. One thousand, three hundred concrete houses were built, arranged in a symmetrical pattern encompassing circular greens and parks. 

North of the junction of Malahide Road, stands an imposing Georgian crescent of twenty six houses, the only such crescent in Ireland. Built in 1792 by Charles Ffolliatt, a property developer from Aungier Street. It is said to have been built as a spite wall to block the view of the sea from Marino House. The nature of the dispute is lost in time, but whether the developer’s petty insult hastened the Earl’s end we can’t say. He had more important matters to observe, being president of the Royal Irish Academy and in the Irish Parliament a keen supporter of Henry Grattan and the assertion of Irish Independence. The Earl died in 1799 at seventy years of age, so at least he never got to see the hated Act of Union, that disaster being implemented two years later.

The Crescent was originally a redbrick terrace, but the facades were plastered in the Regency years as was then the fashion. The small park in front of the Crescent was originally for residents, though is now open to the public. It is named for Bram Stoker, the author of sensational novels in the Belle Epoque.

Abraham (Bram) Stoker was born in 1847 and lived at Number 15. Florence Balcombe, who lived at 1, became his wife. Oscar Wilde was a suitor, but she opted for Stoker and they married in 1878. Oscar wasn’t pleased, but he and Stoker remained friends, even after the Fall. The Stokers moved to London where Bram worked as manager for actor Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre until his death in 1912.

Stoker’s most enduring work is Dracula, published in 1897. A landmark of Gothic horror, it is an epistolary novel beginning with the account of Jonathan Harker, summoned to the Transylvanian Castle of Count Dracula. Dracula has become the archetypal Vampire, an ancient, nocturnal species that feeds on human blood. The legend is woven into European folklore from which Stoker drew his inspiration. There were also antecedents closer to home.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla was published a quarter century earlier. Carmilla was a lesbian vampire, with the ability to morph into the form of a cat; Catwoman to Stoker’s Batman, who was himself wreathed in an aura of sexual ambiguity. With the heady mix of sex, death, horror and everlasting life, no surprise that Dracula became a staple of Hollywood horror. Nosferatu, a German expressionist silent film of the twenties, was the second film version of the book.

Florence, executor of her spouse’s estate, won a lawsuit against the filmmakers specifying that all copies be destroyed. The film, like the legend, endures, a creepy masterpiece in monochrome.

Both Fairview Park and Bram Stoker Park are closed off by the railway barrelling inland. At the end of Fairview is the Westwood Club, with a fifty metre swimming pool, indoor tennis courts, gyms and studios, a veritable mecca for health and fitness. Westwood were established across the bay in the Deep South at Leopardstown in 1988. I worked there for a time, but more in overalls than leotards. I painted murals for the studios, finding angels amidst the physical jerks. 

We are all in the gutter

but some of us are looking at the stars

More metaphysical pleasures are celebrated at Bram Stoker’s Castle Dracula Experience housed in the Westwood Club. The experience is a two hour evening show, an interactive experience with characters from Dracula, and the life of Bram Stoker. Ironically, perhaps, it finds itself closed due to the pandemic.

The quote is a line written by Oscar Wilde in his comedy of infidelity, Lady Windermere’s Fan. It is echoed in the Pretenders 1981 song Message of Love, written by Chrissie Hind, something of an ode to fidelity, from their second album. The line is usually read as advocating the ability of art, or love, to lift us above the humdrum.

North Dublin’s Sandy Shore – 3

Cleary’s Pub lies in the shadow of the Loopline where it crosses Talbot Street. It is packed with the glinting brass and gloomy wood of the genuine, olde worlde Irish pub. With genuine passenger and freight trains hurtling overhead. I have stopped there on my way to concerts in Croke Park and in bygone days to slake my thirst after a hard day’s night in the Sheriff Street Sorting Office adjoining Connolly Station. Or even before the working night. The zombie shift could be tedious, but with hazardous interludes, so it was no harm to soften the sharper extremities of perception with a couple of pints before closing time. There were times too, in the wee small hours, when the Sorting Office would ring empty and hollow, the workers having repaired to some early opener to put in a round or two. I’d need to solve whatever task they’d set for me, some devious and booby trapped blockage, before sloping off into the dawn to herd them home from whatever watering hole they were hiding in. Grainger’s and the North Star being most likely.

Sheriff Street itself heads seaward before the Loopline, skirting the back end of the IFSC before crossing the Royal Canal to end off in the distance at East Wall Road. Our path continues northwards. A little further along Amiens Street we cross the line of the North Circular Road. Seville Place is on our right and Portland Row slopes up to our left towards Summerhill from where it continues on as the North Circular Road proper. At the five point intersection stands a notable Dublin landmark: the Five Lamps. This famous monument was erected in 1880 to fulfil the wishes of Lieutenant General Henry Hall who died five years earlier. Hall, from Athenry in County Galway, served with the British Army in Bengal and wanted his memorial to encourage sobriety. The cast iron fountain at its base provided clean drinking water, not available in the surrounding tenements.

The Five Lamps miraculously survived the North Strand Bombing of May 1941. WW2 was phrased the Emergency in neutral Ireland, but bits of war intruded. Three hundred houses were destroyed and twenty eight people died in this rare and brutal assault by German planes. Whether it was a mistake or a warning by the Luftwaffe we don’t know. Dublin had sent firefighters up to Belfast to deal with the aftermath of German bombings there, and Ireland’s neutrality was always slanted toward the Allies. Ireland remains neutral, though not passive, at time of going to press.

Continuing along North Strand Road, we cross the Royal Canal at Newcomen Bridge which is also the site of the first lock of the Royal Canal. The Royal Canal was the northside riposte to the Grand Canal on the southside. In 1790 construction began and soon the canal flowed westwards from Phibsborough to the Shannon River at Longford. The city extension of the Royal, as with the Grand, followed in the nineteenth century to link the Shannon with the Irish Sea. The Dublin Mullingar railway from the mid nineteenth century runs alongside the canal for much of its length.

Looking westward from the bridge, through the chaos of canal, railway and cityscape, Croke Park frames the horizon. The eighty thousand capacity stadium is the third largest in Europe. A feature of a stadium visit is the Skyline Tour. Way up in the eaves, it gives an elevated, dizzying, view over Dublin City. Croke Park has been the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) since its foundation in 1884. The major finals in hurling and football are played there. It is also, betimes, a concert venue. U2, Bruce Springsteen and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are amongst those who have headlined, and whom I’ve seen.

The Strand Cinema on the eastern side of the road was built in the mid thirties, becoming briefly a music venue and a bowling alley, before closing down along with so many suburban cinemas. The art deco facade was preserved and has been tastefully adapted as the frontage of an apartment complex.

Once more beneath the railway, this one also heading west, we continue through the dingy city outskirts to reach the Annesley Bridge crossing the Tolka River. Upstream, the river has enjoyed a pleasant suburban sojourn through The Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin and Drumcondra. But, off to our right, the murky Tolka seeps towards the docklands before taking a sharp left to join with the waters of the bay. East Wall Road continues straight into the docklands and eventually meets the Liffey at the East Link Bridge.

I worked in a factory down on East Wall approaching the Millennium. Planart made components for computers, bound for Finland mostly. It was a small operation, so I could follow through from darkroom to the final, messy business of etching. Urban spacemen in protective gear, the acid got everywhere. Not a place of love stories, so. Still, a young woman working production took a shine to the guy I worked with in the darkroom. I love a man with an accent, she said. Mac was from Arklow. I was appointed matchmaker, but such hints that I dropped, clanging from a height, went unheard by the Adonis of Arklow.

We argued regularly over music. There was wall to wall radio on the shop floor, strictly commercial, while one hip hop comrade was confined to the canteen for his aural hit. Rock music prevailed in the darkroom where I worked with Mac. The Cranberries were coming on strong just then. Their song, Zombie, stood out. Dolores Riordan wrote it in response to the death of two English boys in the IRA bombing of Warrington in 1993. Riordan’s enraged yodel fed directly into the zeitgeist. Mac quibbled with its political naivety, as he saw it. But it was a passionate vindication of light, and of leaving behind the dark, the heroic dead, and the persistent undead. No Need to Argue was the album, their second, released in 1994, and a global multi million seller.

It’s the same old theme
Since nineteen-sixteen
In your head, in your head, they’re still fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dying
Zombie, zombie, zombie!
What’s in your head?