Brinsley Sheridan's Home Under Threat

ODS

THE PHOENIX MAGAZINE wrote:

Saving Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Home

February 9, 2007

A "school for scandal" has emerged over plans to demolish the birthplace of playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at 12 Dorset Street Lower, where Shane Murphy with an address in Malahide, has lodged a planning application.

Lodged on Friday December 22, Murphy's scheme would level the Sheridan house and also the adjacent building, the disused Moy bar, to allow for the erection of a new complex of nine apartments on top of a commercial unit.

Formerly a fine Georgian house of four floors over basement, Sheridan's home stood intact close to the corner of Dominick Street until the 1980's - during when the house was boarded up, the top two floors removed, and the plaque mysteriously disappeared. Since then, the building has sat empty alongside the Moy bar, which has also become disused.

Unfortunately for Murphy, what remains of Sheridan's house is listed in its entirety on the Record of Protected Structures, and this is likely to present difficulties for his scheme. Oddly he did not seek to have the building de-listed before applying for planing permission. Such applications are automatically referred to a number of prescribed bodies, including An Taisce.

In the past there have been attempts by conservationists to save the building but the exact ownership proved elusive, with the Dominican Fathers being among those denying possession – although they did apply to put in a car park in the rear, back in 1993.

Happily for all, the current application resolves such riddles, and so there has been an upsurge in activity. Helpful fellow that he is, Senator David Norris has lodged an objection noting all the expected reasons.

Now that word is out, we might expect some coverage from the likes of Fintan O'Toole, who has published a well received biography on Sheridan. Or perhaps O'Toole has had enough of conservationist malarkey - given his own recent planning controversy?

The Irish Independent wrote:

Developer makes play for Sheridan's birthplace

Sat, Feb 10 07

A DEVELOPER plans to demolish the birthplace of 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and replace it with an apartment block.

Planning permission has been sought from Dublin City Council by Shane Murphy, with an address at Malahide in Dublin, to demolish the playwright and Whig MP's former home at 12 Upper Dorset Street. Mr Murphy wants to build nine apartments, including a luxury penthouse suite.

A listed building, the house is currently in a dilapidated condition and two of the upper floors have been demolished. A conservation report attached to the planning application calls it an "eyesore".

As well as the apartments, there would be a retail unit at ground floor level, and the adjoining disused Moy pub will be demolished.

Born in October 1751, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the author of The School for Scandal (1777), considered to be among the greatest comedy of manners written in English.

The application has been opposed by Senator David Norris, who said last night that a blue plaque signifying that the house had cultural merit had been placed on the building in the 1980s, but had since been removed and the upper floors demolished.

"We have to draw a line somewhere," he said. "We can't go around putting plaques up and then demolishing the building. The facade could be retained and I think special consideration should be given to this house."

Senator Norris' objection states it is "regrettable" that the Georgian building had been allowed fall into such a neglected state that the top two floors are missing.

A decision from Dublin City Council is expected in the next two weeks.

Paul Melia

The house is really in a sorry state :



Any thoughts?

walrusgumble

typical, thats all we need, more bloody overpriced shoeboxes that we call apartments.

one thing thou, why did literature societies allow the building to degrade in such away years ago?

InFront

Exactly. Why was it allowed get into that state? Where was the concern before this planning application?

And is that thing even remotely salvageable?! I must admit I haven't heard of this writer. If the house is of adequate importance to have deserved one of those plaques, I doubt that it will be granted an application for demolition.

ODS

Permission granted on Feb 8th. The wholly inadaquate application didnt even have a set of interior photos of no 12; a remarkable facilitation by Dublin City Council.

Irish Times wrote:

Build them up and knock them down
Fintan O'Toole

Saturday February 16 2007

Culture Shock: We use our great writers as a unique selling point, but we can't even be bothered to preserve the houses they lived in.

Recently, when the Abbey Theatre staged Richard Brinsley Sheridan's great comedy The School for Scandal, even its management was taken aback by the popularity of the production. Over the last 20 years, only around half a dozen Abbey productions have managed to sell 550 seats or more every night of their run. The School for Scandal, along with such huge hits as The Shaughraun and Dancing at Lughnasa, was one of them. This success, though, was not, on a long view, all that surprising. The School, along with Sheridan's first play The Rivals, are the only 18th-century plays that still hold a place in the international English-language repertoire. Given any kind of decent production (and the Abbey's was more than decent), their energy, their vividness, their linguistic invention and their rich characterisations still get through to audiences.

It says something about the fecklessness of Irish cultural memory, however, that just as the Abbey was putting Sheridan back in an Irish context, permission has been granted to demolish the house, 10 minutes walk from the theatre, where Sheridan was born in 1751. That house, 12 Dorset Street, is saturated with Irish theatrical and literary history. Sheridan's father, Thomas, was one of the greatest Irish actors of his age and, as manager of Smock Alley theatre, a revolutionary figure in the development of theatre here. It was Thomas who, at the cost of riots and ultimate ruin, insisted on the professional dignity of actors by removing audience members from the stage and refusing to repeat speeches on demand in the course of a performance. Sheridan's mother, Frances, is easily the most important Irish woman writer of the 18th century, a pioneer of the epistolary novel and a considerable playwright whose A Trip to Bath was a huge influence on her son's work.

Sheridan himself, though he left Ireland at the age of 11 and never returned, was a self-consciously, even insistently, Irish figure. In the course of his long political career, he campaigned for Irish independence, developed ties with the United Irishmen, devoted himself to the cause of Catholic emancipation, spoke out against the abuse of Irish political prisoners, and conceived an idea that would have a huge bearing on Irish history after his death - the notion of an Irish party in the Westminster parliament. He was regarded in his time as a great adornment to Irish national pride, not least for his sensational speeches against the governor of India, Warren Hastings, which are milestones in the development of international human rights law.

The idea that Sheridan's birthplace should be preserved has been around for at least 50 years now. In 1956, for example, the Longford-Westmeath deputy, Frank Carter, raised the issue in the Dáil, citing "certain houses . . . which could and should be preserved". He listed three in particular: the homes of the 1916 Rising leader Thomas Clarke, the 19th-century nationalist John Mitchel, and Sheridan's birthplace. "A move should be made, preferably voluntary, if people were sufficiently civic-minded, to preserve those buildings, but if a move is not made voluntarily, then steps should be taken by the State, even in a small way, to preserve these famous buildings."

Some small moves were eventually made. The house was listed for preservation. A blue plaque was erected on the front wall in the early 1970s by Dublin Tourism. Bizarrely, however, the plaque was removed soon afterwards. While blue plaques adorn numerous buildings where Sheridan lived in London and Bath, Dublin has the unique distinction of having actually removed one. The obliteration of the house's historical significance seems to have been a deliberate prelude to its eventual destruction.

For many years now, it has been nothing more than a semi-derelict shell with bricked-up windows and no roof. In another bizarre twist, number 12 and number 13 Dorset Street came to be distinguished, not as landmarks, but as eyesores. A Bord Pleanála inspection report on proposals to demolish number 13 noted of the two houses that "they stand out in the streetscape. In their current state, they detract from the amenity of the area." In 50 years, Sheridan's house had gone, in official discourse, from a "famous building" to an infamous one.

Does any of this matter? At an economic level, it probably does. Dublin is sold to visitors as a literary and theatrical city, and the authorities are busily attaching literary associations even to structures which have no previous connection to James Joyce, Sean O'Casey or Samuel Beckett, all of whom have new Liffey bridges named after them. Yet Dorset Street, on which two of the greatest dramatists in the English language, O'Casey and Sheridan, were born within a few hundred metres of each other, makes less than nothing of its genuine historical associations. This seems perversely wasteful.

More importantly, though, the likely demolition of Sheridan's birthplace implies a neurotic disconnection from the lived reality of our cultural heritage. Writers can be fetishised in the streetscape by sticking their resonant names on bridges, pubs, hotels or industrial estates. But their actual lives, the things that locate them in time and place, are not worth remembering.

© 2007 The Irish Times.

InFront

I think the real disgrace would have been buying back the property, rebuilding the house of a figure of very questionable fame, and all just to stick a blue plaque up on the wall.

There are historical projects of far greater merit both within Dublin and around the country. How much would posters have been willing to play to fix the above mess and erect a plaque?