Grafton Street: the buskers, the green, the bandstand
The pedestrian spine, the street musicians who made their names on it, and the pond beyond the arch. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Molly Malone statue
Start at the bottom of the street by Molly and her barrow — bronze, much-handled, the cockles-and-mussels song made solid. Touristy and the locals roll their eyes, but it's the right place to point yourself up the hill into the pedestrian run.

2. Grafton Street buskers
Walk the length slowly. This is where Glen Hansard and a dozen others learned to hold a crowd; on a good afternoon there's a string quartet outside one shop and a folk singer outside the next. Drop a coin — the standard here is genuinely high.

3. Bewley's Café
The grand old coffee house halfway up, with the Harry Clarke stained-glass windows in the back room. Whether it's open and serving changes with the years; if the doors are open, go in for the windows even if you skip the coffee.

4. Fusiliers' Arch
Grafton Street ends at the stone arch into the green — a memorial to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, locally nicknamed Traitors' Gate for the regiment's Boer War service. Walk under it; the park opens straight ahead.

5. St Stephen's Green pond and bridge
Bear left to the larger pond with its waterfowl and the little O'Connell Bridge across the neck of it. Benches all round; this is the spot to sit, and half of working Dublin does at lunchtime. The Victorian layout is kept almost exactly as it was.

6. The bandstand
End at the cast-iron Victorian bandstand in the middle of the green, still used for summer lunchtime concerts. From here it's a short walk to the St Stephen's Green Luas at the top of the park. A green that earns its place in the middle of the shops.

Grafton Street: the buskers, the green, the bandstand