Disembodied Voices:14 Henrietta St, Dublin

I’m back on the social history trail, this time in Dublin.

Just like NYC’s Tenement Museum, @14henriettastreet is doing its bit to make sure the lives of history’s regular people aren’t forgotten by telling the story of one house (originally built for some showy Georgians but later carved up into crammed tenements for the decidedly less dollared).

Rooms have been preserved/recreated exactly as seen in surviving century-old photographic evidence – but you have to conjure a soundtrack of rumbling tummies, scuttling rats and wind whistling through broken windows to get the real picture.

Pic 1: Wanna take a guess as to how many this bed slept? Four on, four under (bodies rotating the next night in the name of fairness). Extra point if you spot the ensuite facilities under the bed.

Pic 2: Any dwellers returning home with blue-mottled clothes? – schoolboy error! That was a tell-tale sign you’d had one too many jars and had bounced off all the Reckitt-blue walls on your way back up the stairs.

Pic 3: And my favourite snippet… One elderly former resident who lived here as a boy regularly pops in for a biscuit and a chat. “It’s the only place I can hear Mum’s voice,” he says.