Come Here To Me!

“We no longer have a retail outlet in Dublin, but visitors to our new base, in a converted stables, near Lucan, just outside Dublin, are welcome, by appointment.”
–Irish Historical Picture Company online.

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I used to spend a good bit of time in here, The Irish Historical Picture Company.

In truth, there probably wasn’t a street in Ireland they didn’t have a snap of in a previous life. Sometimes however it was more fun to just browse random parts of the country, looking at amazing images that in some cases gave life to the old saying, the one about a thousand words and all that.

Of course, a simple eBay search shows it isn’t impossible to find such images. Yet the sheer volume of them, under one roof, was staggering. From the revolutionary years to quiet rural roads of the nineteenth century, headline news to daily routine was well documented. Occasionally, if I am giving a walking tour, a tourist will ask about this place, saying they spotted it across the Liffey. At this time of year in particular it is missed.

I only spotted it again recently in all truth from the upstairs window of the Workman’s Club pub, which provides a look down over the Liffey. It’s shopfront is redecorated in the way closed down shops tend to be, a mix of idiotic tags nobody can read, notices for this, that and the other and pasted political posters. A few letters have vanished too, but not enough to confuse anyone about what existed there before.

How funny the snap above now shows the past life of a place that frequently amazed me itself with an image of a familiar site in days long gone by.