All those coffee bars and what is falafel?
Rathmines hasn’t changed one bit — so long as you don’t step outside of Slattery’s, says as he returns to an old favourite haunt
SITTING in Slattery’s bar as the slanting winter sun brightened the other side of the street, you wouldn’t think Rathmines had changed an iota since I first walked across those well-worn floorboards and ordered a bottle of stout almost a half-century ago.
At that time Slattery’s and Rathmines probably hadn’t changed much in the previous half-century either. Dominated by the 128ft-high clock tower, known locally as the “four-faced liar” because each of its dials tells a different time, this small township has been the balcony of Dublin.
With its impressive town hall, its Victorian library and the great green dome of the church of ‘Our Lady of Refuge’, it has an air of detachment from the city on its doorstep. But as I stepped back out into the street, I realised that apart from Slattery’s pub and these three grand public buildings all my yesterdays have disappeared.
The streets of Rathmines are now lined with trendy coffee shops, wine bars, up-market barbers, art galleries and even one restaurant offering falafel — whatever that might be? The gentrification of the township over the past five or six years has been stunning.
“We would like to think that,” says art gallery proprietor Deirdre Irvine, whose gallery, The Open Window, a couple of doors from the Stella Cinema, has a colourful display of art and a welcoming air, looking out on Castlewood Avenue.
“We have the Stella cinema and some trendy bars and The Swan [shopping centre] has upped its game — but we’re not in competition with Ranelagh yet. There is still a reasonably nitty-gritty atmosphere about the place.”
That air of seediness that once pervaded Rathmines does strike you when you cross from the bridge from Portobello into Lower Rathmines Road. Apart from some notable exceptions, the once-grand Georgian townhouses still look as if they’re a staging post and the people living in what are now called apartments, rather than flats, are on their way to somewhere else.
In my time in the early 1970s, and for a decade afterwards, Rathmines was not just Dublin’s, it was Ireland’s ‘bedsit’ land. Country lads and girls spent their weekdays in dingy flats that emptied out at the weekends as they poured by bus and train back to the small towns of Ireland for two frantic nights in the pubs and the dance halls with showbands on stage and a mineral bar at the back of the hall.
That transient atmosphere has disappeared. It has taken on a more permanent look and even in January people were sitting outside having a coffee, watching the world go by and the workmen doing up an old red-brick building which used to be the Belfast Bank.
“When I came here first five years ago it was unusually downmarket in comparison to Ranelagh — but since then a lot of money has come in,” says Deirdre, as she steers me towards the Stella Cinema.
The revival of the cinema, a relic of the past which closed due to lack of interest in 2004, only to rise again in 2017, has become the metaphor for the revival of Rathmines itself. Its rivals like Xtravision and Golden Discs came and went and after a makeover by Paddy McKillen Jnr’s Press Up Group, ‘hip’ and ‘happening’ came back to the street where it first opened in the optimistic days of the Irish Free State in the mid-1920s.
Of course that has triggered some less welcome developments, because rents have risen considerably and many of the previous shop-owners have had to move on.
“In the last five years I have noticed a huge difference, we’re not quite there yet, we need a couple of really good restaurants, but people are taking pride in their shop fronts and Rathmines has become very multi-cultural,” says Deirdre.
“I wanted to bring quality art, but I have a policy that everyone is welcome to come in — too many galleries have a stuffy attitude and I didn’t want that. Rathmines is ideal for me because the hinterland is quite wealthy and there are a lot of discerning buyers.”
The employees in the trendy new coffee bars are mostly foreign and less inclined to talk about the gentrification of the town. Some don’t seem to have noticed; to them Rathmines is just another part of another big city. They’ve arrived with little inclination of the past or the folk memory many Irish people have of Rathmines as the place where they first found freedom. The new arrivals do their jobs and the managers or owners are not around to explain what attracted them to this part of town.
But for Robert Feighery, who owns Doran’s barber shop, just off the Main Street on Castlewood Ave, the shop and the town go hand in hand. He takes down a big box of old photographs of Jimmy and Willie Doran, the last family proprietors of the shop founded in 1912. One is of two old barber chairs, where it is said Padraig and Willie Pearse sat to have their hair cut before going off to the Easter Rising and their deaths. Another is a picture of Brendan Gleeson dressed in a white coat outside the shop, preparing for a stage role as a barber.
“There has been a huge change in the years since I have taken over,” says Robert. “A lot of the older people think Rathmines is losing its character. Shops are opening and closing all the time... but you can’t stand still in business and I think it’s for the best.”
Rathmines was the first place in Ireland to have its own Urban District Council under local government reform in 1840. It was under this regime that it got its impressive public buildings, but such freedoms were not tolerated in the new Free State and it was abolished in 1930. It left Rathmines stranded between the city and the growing suburbs and the upper-middle classes who populated the grand roads without the power to influence its development, as they did in the past.
William Clegg, whose grandfather, also William, moved from North King Street in 1946 and modelled his shoe repair shop on the one he had left behind, has noted the changes from behind the counter of his shop on Lower Rathmines Road.
“It had an upgrade in recent years, but it still has the same character. People come in all the time and they have a connection with Rathmines although they no longer live here. They had a flat once, or they used to drink here,” he says. He notes the arrival of The Mart, an art collective in the old Fire Station, as one of the welcome changes, along with the swimming pool.
Sometimes people returning for a brief visit think Rathmines should have stayed the same, but, apart from Slattery’s, the bars have changed dramatically, the night-time scene has an edgier feel than other parts of the city with a younger crowd.
At one time Rathmines was a place you passed through on the way to somewhere else; now it seems to have found its own character. It’s an outpost of the city but separate, a place with its own distinct feel that has got over its embarrassment with itself and seems happy to proclaim its own identity.
‘Rathmines had an upgrade in recent years, but it has still managed to keep the same character...’