Come Here To Me!

JSA Architects image of ALDI Terenure, incorporating the old DUTC tram terminus on left and right into the modern design. (Image Credit: JSA)

Before Nelson’s Pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley started from Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend, and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross.

The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off:
– Rathgar and Terenure!
-Come on, Sandymount Green!

While forever immortalised in Ulysses, there are still remnants of the Dublin United Tramways Company to be found around Dublin city today, including the former premises of the DUTC on Marlborough Street, which the name of the company in the stonework still.

1914 image of trams in Terenure. Notice The Eagle House on the left, still going strong today. (Image: National Library of Ireland)

At Terenure,the old and the new meet in a curious way, with historic features of the DUTC tram terminus incorporated into the ALDI development. Not being from the area, but living nearby, stepping inside the ALDI and looking at its surroundings gave me a sense there was a longer history to the site than a supermarket. At the nearby The Eagle House pub, the location where Joyce’s mother was born, pictures on the wall show the local streetscape at a time when trams were a part of life there, the familair red triangle of the No. 15 which serviced Terenure and its environs. Today, Terenure is serviced by the 15 route of Dublin Bus, a nod towards the historic tram route.

The 15 tram for Terenure in Rathmines.

The Terenure tram depot opened in February 1872, at a time when horses were still utilised by the DUTC. As Joseph V. O’Brien notes, the introduction of electric trams into the city at the very end of the ninteenth century was considered “one of Dublin’s minor glories”, and while critics felt the minimum fare was too high (twice that of Glasgow, a city of considerably more industry), electric trams were widely praised. By January 1900, most of DUTC’s system had moved to the electronic system. It was to be a system which lasted less than a half century. The DUTC made it to the mid 1940s, when – under the banner of ‘progress’ – the tram system in Dublin ground to a halt, with the exception of the Hill of Howth tram which would carry into the subsequent decade. The final tram to pull into Terenure did so on 31 August 1948. Dozens of miles of tram track would dissappear in subsequent decades from Dublin. In time, the city would lay down tramlines once more, but many parts of Dublin once serviced by the DUTC don’t see trams today.