Inside Dublin’s newest museum, a house once occupied by 100 people

Here, tea was made, babies were born, loves were lost, fires lit, letters written, bread was broken, walls were white-washed, and lives were lived,” says the voiceover on the video.

It's being projected on a wall in a basement room at 14 Henrietta Street in the north inner city of Dublin. In the corner there is a bed with a horsehair mattress covered with heavy wool army coats. There’s a table with a candle, an enamel basin for washing, a blackened hearth with a kettle and pot.

We hear how entire families lived in miserable conditions in rooms like this, battling cold, damp, rodents and diseases like cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. At one time, a family of 13 lived in this room – six or seven to a bed.

We’re on a tour of 14 Henrietta Street, which opened over the weekend (Sept 15) – the newest of Dublin's string of museums dedicated to its complicated past. A Georgian House which has had many incarnations over nearly 300 years – from a magnificent aristocratic townhouse in the 1700s to tenement dwelling for 100 years until the 1970s – the house fell into disrepair until its recent extensive restoration.

The room we're standing in has been recreated to show part of its history as a tenement house. However rather than dwell on hard times, the museum shows the building’s whole history, with stories dating back to its heyday in Georgian times too.

14 Henrietta Street, along with number 13 and 15, was built in around 1748 by entrepreneur and property developer Luke Gardiner who led the development of much of the northside of the city including Henrietta Street, Ireland’s first Georgian Street, which was started in the 1720s.

“You’re walking through 250 years of history. This house has gone from Georgian splendour to the tenements which you’ll see in the basement,” says our guide Eithne, as she leads us up the staircase to the formal reception rooms on the first floor.

The drawing room has bare walls, a wooden floor and tall windows overlooking the cobbles below. In the room to the rear are portraits of the house’s first residents, The Right Honourable Richard Lord Viscount Molesworth and his wife Mary, who had two children here.

We learn of life in the 1700s when Dublin was a cosmopolitan city, second city of the British Empire. Terraces like these, many set on elegant squares, were designed to show wealth and power, a place for society’s ruling elite to mingle at dances and dinners in lavishly decorated salons. The rooms are bare now, but musical instruments on a frieze around the top of the walls hint at their past life.

Following the 1800 Act of Union (which joined Ireland to Great Britain), when the Irish parliament was dissolved and the aristocracy departed for London, Henrietta Street became a hub for professionals and the legal profession. In the 1850s, number 14 was the headquarters of the Encumbered Estates Court, which sold insolvent estates after the Famine.

In 1877, the house was converted into tenements – low-income housing with one, three and four-roomed flats available to rent. The house had a toilet and running water and was advertised in The Irish Times as a large house with ‘every modern sanitary improvement, gas and wc on landings, Vartry water, drying yard and a range with oven for each tenant’.

However, as with London, Edinburgh and many other cities, economic conditions were tough and overcrowding was a problem. By 1911, there were 100 people living in the house and 1,000 people living in the street’s 19 buildings. One sixth of the city’s population lived in tenements and the death rate was the highest in the British Isles – nearly one third of children didn’t live to age five.

The tour takes visitors up the backstairs into the 1950s room, to hear audio of local children asking a former resident, Peter Brannigan, about the toys and games of his childhood. In a front room, Mrs Dowling’s flat, a 1970s dwelling is recreated, furnished with a piano, dressers of china, a sewing machine, a table set for tea – with many items donated by former residents.

Partitions show how the room was divided between bedroom, sitting room and kitchen, a home for a family of four. New suburbs eased the cramped conditions and in 1979, the house’s life as a tenement ended when the last family moved out.

Since then, much of Henrietta Street fell into neglect, and this is the result of a ten-year restoration project by Dublin City Council. Those behind the project say this is not a museum full of artefacts but the house is the artefact, telling its stories through the back halls and stairs with walls of raddle red and Reckitt’s blue paint, the rickety banisters, the wood floors, fireplaces and the patterns from rescued scraps of linoleum and wallpaper.

Like any city, Dublin has been through dark times and a tour which helps us understand some of its life story, and how it survived times of great adversity and flourished in others, is a sometimes emotional but ultimately rewarding experience.

14 Henrietta Street tours operate Wednesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm and Sunday 12 to 4pm; 14henriettastreet.ie

Other historic Dublin tours

Two other tours with stories of happiness and sorrow from Dublin’s not so bright days are the Jeanie Johnston tall ship (jeaniejohnston.ie) and Epic, the Irish Emigration Museum (epicchq.com). During the Famine between 1845 and 1849, one million people died and another million emigrated from Ireland.

The Jeanie Johnston is a seaworthy replica of a tall ship which took emigrants to Canada from 1848 to 1855 and a tour on board the boat, which is tied to a dock on the River Liffey, shows what living conditions were like below decks. Although conditions were harsh, and many of the ships of the time became coffin ships, there was no loss of life on board the Jeanie Johnston which transported 2,500 people to a new life.

Nearby at Epic Museum, in the vaults of the old CHQ wine and tobacco warehouse, a self-guided tour brings visitors through fascinating stories of adversity and achievement, telling sad tales of emigration but also how the Irish went on to influence and shape the world. It celebrates achievements in art, science, music, sports and even American presidents (22 of which claimed Irish ancestry).