Henrietta Street Conservation Plan - The Heritage Council

Fig.5.6.2 Children outside No.9 Henrietta Street,
early 20th century.
Fig.5.6.1
Resident outside No.2 Henrietta Street, 1952. (Source: IAA).
his political hold over the country, than his former neighbour
and opponent Henry Boyle, Ponsonby was a member of an
enormously influential political dynasty which stretched back
into the mid-17th century, and would continue, in one form or
another, until close to the end of the 19th century.
This extraordinary galaxy of politically and socially important
residents shined its brightest in the 18th century. The
passing of the Act of Union in 1800 is generally accepted
as marking a watershed in the history of the country as well
as specifically in relation to this street. Populated during
its (Dublin’s and Henrietta Street’s) prime by those whose
prestige and power was centred in the Irish parliament,
the demise of the parliament resulted in the loss of a whole
political culture as well as the loss of the machinery of direct
legislative government itself. While much of the north side
estates of grand houses suffered almost immediate decline
(divided into tenements with consequent poverty and
squalor), Henrietta Street was given a partial reprieve by the
interest in the street of the legal profession, and the location
there of many independent chambers, as well as of the King’s
Inns themselves. Attracted by the construction of the library
in 1832, many solicitors, and barristers set up chambers
(partial offices and residences) here. However Tristram
Kennedy’s attempts to establish Henrietta Street at the centre
of legal education, with the establishment of the Queen’s Inns
Chambers in Nos. 3, 9 and 10 in the 1840s, never took hold.
Eventually even the lawyers abandoned the formerly
residential houses of the street towards the end of the 19th
century. All of the houses, which had been in the possession
of Tristram Kennedy at the end of his life (approximately three
quarters of them) were purchased by the infamous former
Lord Mayor, Alderman Meade, who notoriously stripped many
of these houses of their chimneypieces, which he sold in
London, and removed irreplaceable staircases in order that
he might fit in further partitions for extra squalid tenements
(fig.5.6.1). Nearly all of the houses were in tenements by the
beginning of the following century: the 1901 census listed 141
families, consisting of 897 people in total, living in Henrietta
Street (Brown 2000 quoting the 1901 census returns for
Inns Quay, Dublin). It was entirely appropriate then that the
Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, whose principal
aim was service to the poor, acquired No. 10 and established
there a facility for providing education and support to exwomen
prisoners, which they further expanded in 1908 with
the purchase of No. 9 (fig.5.6.2). Their work with the poor
of the north inner city continues to this day. However it is a
reflection of the anonymity of poverty that the vast and intense
history of the many hundreds of families who lived out their
lives within the same walls as the Gardiners, Boulters, Boyles,
Ponsonbys and Stones, has passed largely unrecorded.
5.7 Present Significance
Henrietta Street is also remarkable for the quality and
variety of its present social character. The very survival of
Henrietta Street in the recent past has been founded upon
the singular commitment to the street of many of its current
residents. Nearly all of the houses on Henrietta Street,
with two significant exceptions, are currently occupied.
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