Temple Bar

This guide to Temple Bar in Dublin goes back to 1977, when the state transport company Coras Iompair Eireann drew up plans to bulldoze this cobbled warren of old warehouses for a giant bus station and shopping centre, and quietly began buying up the buildings around you. While it waited for the money and paperwork to align, it rented those buildings out cheap on short leases, and painters, musicians and secondhand booksellers moved into the empty factories. The guide follows that quarter through the mid-1980s, as the property market wobbled and residents, traders and the heritage group An Taisce organized against the plan. Listen as you walk the cobblestones underfoot, laid long before any of this began.