
Grafton Street
Pedestrianised shopping street lined with buskers, cafes and department stores between two leafy squares.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Grafton Street in Dublin follows a teenager named Glen Hansard, who quit school at thirteen and taught himself to busk on this exact pavement, chasing down a man who once grabbed his coins. It traces how, decades later, a director cast Hansard to play a Dublin busker in a small film shot mostly right here, opposite a nineteen-year-old Czech musician named Marketa Irglova playing a flower seller who stops to listen. Musicians on the street today still pay a small yearly fee, keep their sets to about an hour, and space themselves roughly one hundred meters apart.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Temple Bar
Cobbled cultural quarter of galleries, theatres and pubs saved from a nineteen-seventies bus station plan.
Molly Malone Statue
Bronze fishmonger statue with a fish cart, honoring a folk song's fictional heroine of old Dublin.
Winding Stair Bookshop
Riverside bookshop above a restaurant, in a nineteenth-century building overlooking a historic pedestrian bridge.