Tenters Hooked - Frank McNally on a ground-breaking Dublin housing estate, now 100 years old

Among the subjects I heard discussed at an international literary conference in Portland Oregon last weekend, to my great surprise, was the Dublin 8 housing estate known as the “Tenters”. The conference was mostly about books, as you’d expect. But its theme was modernism, a revolutionary movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that also embraced music and art and produced a general ferment of new ideas.

In literature, the annus mirabilis was 1922, when three ground-breaking works – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland – appeared in quick succession. Hence the title of the Portland event: Making modernism – 1922: 100 years on.

But speaking of wasteland and ground-breaking, 1922 was also when builders began turning what was then Fairbrother’s Fields, a 22-acre site near the Liberties, into a housing scheme for Dublin’s working classes.

Hence the surprise cameo at the conference of the Tenters, the fields’ older name – from a time when the Liberty weavers used to stretch their fabrics on tenterhooks there – which has since been revived.

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As Kelly E Sullivan, a New York writer and academic, explained during a panel on Irish modernism, the idea of living in suburbs was another product of that era’s new thinking. Hence, with its centenary also upon us, the south Dublin estate meriting mention alongside the literary construction works of 1922.

You didn’t have to be in Portland to hear about the Tenters recently. The subject also featured on RTE’s Nationwide programme last month, which reminded viewers how radical such housing schemes must have seemed. They had been a long time coming. First proposed – like the third Home Rule Bill – in 1912, they were delayed for some of the same reasons, including the first World War, 1916, and the Troubles.

One of the politicians who had championed the new estates, Alderman Tom Kelly, was imprisoned after the Rising, while £4 million promised by the British government was diverted towards rebuilding the ruined city centre. But when Kelly got out of jail and threatened to raise an American loan instead, authorities were embarrassed into supporting the first of the new schemes, in the Liberties.

By the time the Fairbrother’s Field project began, Dublin was capital of a Free State. Construction finally started the same year as the Civil War, and the last house was finished in 1924, as uneasy peace redescended. The new homes included parlours, gardens, and other features unheard of in the city centre slums from which many occupants emanated. As historian Maria O’Reilly said on Nationwide, moving from the tenements into such luxury was like “winning the Lotto”.

The Portland conference also heard how, in the 100 years since, the Tenters has been transformed again. Colonised increasingly now by young urban professionals, it has become one of Dublin’s cooler neighbourhoods, within easy reach of the fiercely hipster Fumbally Cafe and other amenities.

Fumbally Lane, from which that cafe gets its name, is among the more celebrated addresses in Ulysses. It was the home of the “two Dublin vestals” who in Stephen Dedalus’s mock parable, climb Nelson’s Pillar and have a picnic at the top: “They give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that high.”

High as the viewing platform is, the pair are further dizzied by trying to stare up at Nelson’s statue. Then they settle down to enjoy the city panorama while eating plums and dropping the stones over the side.

“A Pisgah View of Palestine” Joyce headlines the story, echoing Moses’s vision of the promised land. Maybe the two old ladies could see Fairbrother’s Fields from up there, although we are not told so. It was still only 1904, of course, so the housing estate was still some way off.

Joyce is famously supposed to have expressed the hope that Dublin could be rebuilt if necessary from the pages of Ulysses. It seems somehow poignant that, even as he published his masterpiece in exile, an impoverished, war-ravaged, but at last independent Ireland was getting on with the actual construction of homes to replace the worst urban housing stock in Europe.

If his two old ladies from Fumbally Lane were alive today, they would no doubt be astonished to see what has happened to the Tenters. Perhaps they would also be rendered dizzy again when peering up at local property prices.