Henrietta Street is where Georgian Dublin started, and where it most visibly fell. Built from the 1720s for the city's aristocracy, this short cobbled slope set the pattern — tall brick fronts, fanlight doorways, vast rooms — that spread across the whole north side and then south of the river.
Come up through the markets from Jervis and the street arrives suddenly, grander than its scruffy approach promised. Walk up the slope; the houses climb in status as you go, the doorcases swelling toward the top. The one to enter is No. 14 — a single townhouse that, by 1911, held more than a hundred people in tenement rooms. The museum there tells both stories in one hour, the silk-and-servants Dublin and the collapse into overcrowding, and it does it without flinching.
At the head of the street, James Gandon's King's Inns shuts the view like a backdrop. Drop down past Broadstone — the Egyptian-revival railway terminus — to the Blessington Street Basin, a walled reservoir gone quietly to garden. Sit by the water. The Luas is minutes away.
