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Home. 01’27”

Extract from Moving Dublin.

I grew up in this house in a middle class suburb 8 km from the city centre. It was built in the 1930s as part of a ‘garden suburb’ development which quickly came into favour with the Dublin middleclasses. Until I was 13 the house had a front garden with two fully grown sycamore trees, giving the house a quiet and shady front, while the back opened onto a sunny garden. Across the road, there was a row of shops - a grocery store, a chemist and a newsagent - busy and prosperous, although their custom suffered after Ireland’s first shopping centre opened in nearby Stillorgan in the late 60s.

Behind the shops there was farmland cultivated for crops and grazing. Field by field, the farm was bought up and developed for housing until it disappeared sometime in the early 1980s. The shops, and our front garden, were demolished in 1979 to make way for a 6 lane expressway. The state paid my parents £6000 for the compulsory purchase of the garden. Every acre of land around has now been covered with housing. The prices of these semi-detached 4 bedroom houses on the side of an expressway has soured from £80,000 in 1982 to €1.5 million at the peak of Dublin’s property boom in 2006. -DC

PREMISES

PRACTICES

PLACES

You'll come and find the place

Brookfield to Dublin Castle

PRODUCTION

Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. We look at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses.

Moving Dublin is to be published in the form of a book and DVD in March 2009 by Gandon Editions

Moving Dublin has been commissioned by South Dublin County Council through In Context 3 and funded under the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme.