N x NW extreme: Hugh Lane to Henrietta St, Broadstone and Grangegorman.
We will meet outside the front door of the Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square North. Time allowing we’ll briefly explore this magnificent 18th-century mansion, today Dublin’s municipal gallery, the Hugh Lane Gallery. From the “Hugh Lane,” we’ll walk North and West to see and discuss some of the many historic, civic, residential and ecclesiastical treasures of this district, including…
- Dublin’s most enigmatic church, the Black Church;
- Glasgow- style tenement buildings;
- Gandon’s magnificent King’s Inns;
- John Skipton Mulvaney’s sublime Broadstone station and the extraordinary transport and engineering history of this area.
- The Grangegorman area, formerly a Terra incognito, with its network of mental, health and penal institutions, hospitals, clinics, prisons, asylums and Work Houses, built from the 1700s onward, enclosed behind old high stone walls.
- Among buildings, we will consider are two enormous Georgian-era structures:
- Francis Johnston’s Extraordinary Women’s Penitentiary and
- his Richmond Asylum, formerly part of a complex of Work Houses so vast it once had its own system of coinage.
- A poignant tour through an area that even many Dublin people know relatively little about.
N x NW extreme Hugh Lane to Grangegorman is a long, in-depth walking tour: guests will need a reasonable degree of fitness and stamina. Tour time: 2hr 45 minutes minimum up to 3 hours 25 minutes.
Distance 5.6 -6.9 km. Price: by application when you press the green button and provide us with your dates please.
This tour is run as a public tour from 2- 4 times per year, when, like all our public tours, it is of course open to all. If any of these “North by North-West” tours are currently scheduled, then they will appear in the listings on our Public Tours Page. (Please note that the North by North-West tour is sometimes called the “Grangegorman tour” in our newsletters. ) If you live in Dublin, and are primarily interested in our Public tours, then by far the best way to hear about them is to sign up to the monthly newsletter.
Alternatively, we also offer and run the tour as a private activity for your own, private group, on a date of your own choosing. Please use the green button at any time, to select your date and to book your own private North by North-West area tour. Thank you.
