Middle-class Spread: On the expansion of Glasnevin and other property trends

A dramatic development of recent years on Dublin’s northside has been the apparently relentless expansion of Glasnevin at the expense of what used to be Finglas.

The phenomenon attracted renewed comment on Twitter during the week via the advertisement of a house for sale in “Glasnevin North”, which in this particular case certain observers thought was stretching even the most liberal interpretation of where Glasnevin begins and ends.

But the latter suburb has also been spreading west for years now, at least in the minds of estate agents, bringing its cultural and property values with it.

Like Texas, Glasnevin may be a state of mind for some. Proud natives of Finglas, meanwhile, are under pressure not just from Glasnevinite imperialism, but the even more alien influence of Google Maps, whose naming schemes are often out of step with usage on the ground.

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But Google aside, the rebranding of old neighbourhoods in hope of increased respectability is not a new thing. Indeed, it was my recent mention here of the renaming of Fish Street, the Dublin dockside site of a notorious 1908 murder, that led readers to share two other related tales, one of which also involved Finglas (or didn’t, as the developers of an upmarket housing estate would prefer).

I have some doubt as to the veracity of both anecdotes, but I’ll retell them anyway in the belief that, on average, one of them must be true.

The first concerns an estate that was built circa 1988 on the grounds of the former St Vincent de Paul Orphanage in Glasnevin. The obvious thing would have been for the estate to be called St Vincent’s too. Instead, the developers opted for the much grander Dalcassian Downs (it’s a paradox in itself that any address with “Downs” in it is almost by definition upmarket), after the ancient Irish tribe.

Their justification was supposed proximity to the site where the most famous Dalcassian of all, Brian Boru, breathed his last. Archaeologists might have countered that proximity to the Brian Boru pub was the most they could prove.

Either way, the estate’s location in Glasnevin was uncontentious. But of concern to the developers was the fact that entry to it was off Finglas Road, which runs through this part of Glasnevin as a main artery leading into the city centre. So according to the story, a researcher with a clipboard was dispatched door-to-door on that road to gauge whether there might be support for a local name change.

There wasn’t, except for one trade union official who strongly favoured calling it “Karl Marx Avenue”, or something similar.

That might have been apt because, as you head out past Hart’s Corner, the road does veer sharply left at the estate in question. Even so, the renaming plan went no further.

The other story is from the southside and involves a prominent lawyer who was one of the first people in Dublin to recognise the potential of mews houses: those former stables to the rear of many of the city’s grander properties.

Having successfully converted one as his home in the 1980s, he was then appalled when others saw the same or greater potential and sought planning permission accordingly.

Being the only resident on the lane at that point, however, he had it in his power to organise a one-person plebiscite to rename the lane, and let it be known that he was considering “New Fatima Mansions”, in reference to what was one of the city’s most troubled addresses then. Somehow, that never came to pass either. Whether his threat deterred any development plans is unclear.

It’s funny that mews houses have become so fashionable in modern times, and not just because they used to be stables. Before that, they had an arguably even humbler origin, or at least the word does.

Mews comes from the French verb muer, meaning “to moult”, and dates back to a time when hunting with hawks was common among the upper classes. The birds had to be cooped up when moulting and the houses or sheds at the rear of properties were where that happened

There are echoes of this in Shakespeare, via The Taming of the Shrew (“What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?”) and Richard III (“This day should Clarence closely be mewed up”). Both implied confinement in a coop.

So although mews has become yet another signifier of an exclusive urban address, it has its origins in a sort-of upmarket pigeon loft.