Come Here To Me!

Liffeytown got a smile out of me, and just about everyone else, on the bus home from work today.

What is Liffeytown? Well, between September 12 and 26, the Liffey plays home to little red and green houses, popularly known as Monopoly homes to anyone old enough to stand. Anyone younger than that probably knows them as those things you stick in your mouth. I have an unopened Monopoly set upstairs that I’m now tempted to get out. It’s a nice piece of commentary on an economy that some treated like a game of Monopoly.

Moored between O’Connell Bridge and the Ha’penny Bridge, Liffeytown is a comment on the rise and fall of the property industry, bookmarking the end of an era. Throughout the boom, the city was surrounded by a forest of scaffolding and cranes constructing badly planned, badly designed, disposable architecture. ‘Liffeytown’ presents itself, hopefully, as the last of these ‘ghost estates’ — as a beacon that its time has passed and been replaced by a more sensitively attuned city.

-From Liffeytown.com