Winding Stair Bookshop
Riverside bookshop above a restaurant, in a nineteenth-century building overlooking a historic pedestrian bridge.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Winding Stair Bookshop in Dublin opens on the quay in 2005, with booklovers mourning a shuttered shopfront after the shop went bankrupt. From there it steps back to 1875, when this yellow-fronted riverside building first went up, and follows its many uses, an auction house, a gallery, a toy shop, before it became a bookshop in 1982 and grew into a gathering place for Dublin's writers and musicians who climbed its winding staircase through the night. You'll hear where the shop's name comes from, borrowed from a line by the poet William Butler Yeats. Listen for the mention of what came next for the building, a year after the doors seemed shut for good.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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