Come Here To Me!

No Rare Old Times- but a city with a great story to tell.

The cultural landscape of Dublin will change this summer, when the Little Museum of Dublin opens at 15 St Stephen’s Green. This new non-profit museum will tell the story of Dublin in the 20th Century, and the collection will be completed with the help of the public. In other words it will truly be a people’s museum.

I stumbled across this yesterday by pure chance and have to say it’s quite an interesting idea. Of course many of our cities have museums dedicated to their own history, such as Cork and Galway. The Little Museum of Dublin looks set to open this summer.

In Dublin, we are obviously very lucky to have the National Museums, and also the Story of the Capital at City Hall. The fact the National Museums are free is a huge kudos too.

When on the job with walking tours, I normally direct tourists towards a few places if they want to get to grips with the city a bit better. There’s the Writers Museum, the prior mentioned Story of the Capital at City Hall, the folks at the Dublin Civic Trust and then a number of smaller specialist museums like the excellent Garda Museum or the GPO in-house museum.

I’m interested in seeing how this new venture marks itself out. It’s interesting to note they seem to be looking for people to become patrons of the Museum at this very early stage:

Become a member
As well as donating artefacts, individuals or companies can become Patrons, Life Members or Friends. We have an exclusive programme of benefits for those who support the Little Museum:

Patron (Annual subscription €5000)
Life Member (€1000)
Friend (Annual subscription €95)

A report in todays Irish Times suggests the museum will have a focus on twentieth century Dublin.

Come to think of it, we’ll consider anything to do with Dublin in the 20th century.