Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.If the walls of 14 Henrietta Street could talk, they would share a tale of extravagance and splendour, but also profound poverty and neglect. In this five-storey mansion on Dublin’s oldest Georgian road, aristocrats were eventually replaced by families with as many as 13 members living in a single room. The museum honours the waves of people who entered its halls, sensitively evoking 300 years of social history through their stories. Built in the late 1740s, Number 14’s earliest inhabitants were the Right Honourable Richard, Lord Viscount Molesworth, his second wife Mary Jenney Ussher and their two daughters. The first floor gives a glimpse of their lavish lives — and those of the similarly patrician residents who succeeded them — with high-ceilinged rooms and Lady Molesworth’s pale blue bed chamber, a mahogany four-poster in its centre. Next door, at No 15, Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist philosopher who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, briefly worked for one of these privileged families as a governess from 1786. When the Acts of Union joining Great Britain and Ireland were passed in 1800, the country’s wealthy left Georgian Dublin, largely swarming to Regency London, where power had been transferred. Number 14 fell to professionals such as solicitors and clerks before being occupied by the Dublin Militia, a reserve unit of Britain’s Royal Artillery, and their families.In 1876, it was purchased by landlord Thomas Vance, who established 19 tenement flats. There were two toilets, but as maintenance was minimal, says our tour guide Sheila Robinson, residents often opted for the garden “po”, or privy, instead. By 1911, 850 people had homes in Henrietta Street, with 100 living in No 14 alone, including milliners, French polishers and bookbinders.Entering the corridor, the walls painted in Raddle Red and Reckitts Blue situate the house firmly in the tenement era. The red allegedly protected against damp (and is said to have been used by women as rouge); the blue above it was thought to fight infection. Rodents ran rampant along the wooden floorboards. Mice once skinned by maids to embellish the eyebrows of the lady of the house had become “rats as big as cats”, according to the testimony of children charged with catching them. The back staircase boasts a few authentic banisters but most were tugged out for firewood or rotted away. In the basement, spaces have been redesigned to mimic tenement living. Peter Brannigan, still alive today, was born here in 1939 and lived with his parents and 10 siblings in the house for a decade. “Kids didn’t know it was tough,” says Robinson. They would sing their playground rhymes and swing on the lampposts lining Henrietta Street. Relatives and friends lived mere metres apart. It was “family looking after family,” she says. The front door was never locked, in case someone needed shelter.In the 1930s, tenants began moving to Dublin’s new suburbs, trading tenements for houses with several bedrooms and a garden. The tour culminates in the 1960s-styled flat of the house’s last resident, a Mrs Dowling, complete with patterned wallpaper, lino and a lingering scent of carbolic soap. Shortly after she vacated it in 1979, the town house was close to collapse, then lay derelict for 20 years.Following restoration in the early 2000s, 14 Henrietta Street was opened as a museum in 2018. In 2020, it won the Silletto Prize for community engagement at the European Museum of the Year Awards — a testament to the many former residents who shared their memories of tenement Dublin.14henriettastreet.ieFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
