In the park, on the Pill

Located in the middle of Dublin, beside the Four Courts, Chancery Park is a small but perfectly formed example of everything that’s good and bad about the city. Well, maybe not everything. But a lot.

On the plus side, it’s a charming little garden – a railed-off refuge from the busy streets around it, with a fountain, a pool, and manicured shrubs. Its Art Deco trimmings wouldn’t be out of place in Paris, or Vienna, or any of the better kept cities of Europe.

The downside is that you’ve probably never been in it. Nor had I until recently, although I pass that way often. The problem is the opening hours – 8am to 4pm Monday to Thursday, with a half-day Friday – which are more in keeping with a bank than a public park. It doesn’t open weekends at all, even in summer.

Mind you, the current schedule is a big improvement on the situation a couple of years ago when its gates were unlocked for only two hours a day. The excuse then was “anti-social behaviour” (code for drinking, drug-taking, and related recreations) – a problem for Dublin parks in general, but apparently more acute around here.

That’s still the issue, I’m told. But at least the opening trend is in the right direction. And insofar as it’s open at all, Chancery Park is a better use of public space than a much larger park nearby, Croppies’ Acre – now a permanent no-mans land, except for the dead rebels presumed to lie under it.

Chancery Park is more than a park, by the way. It’s an extension of Chancery House, a block of council flats designed at the same time (1934), also in the Art Deco style, by the then city housing architect, Herbert Simms. As such, it represents one of Dublin’s finer hours.

The mid-1930s was an era when the new Irish State found itself struggling for survival. Yet between then and the late 1940s, the English-born Simms managed to create 17,000 public housing units, bringing best practice from the UK and Holland, where he had studied it, to Dublin.

Well might a posthumous tribute say that few other other public servants could “achieve so much in the space of a short lifetime for the benefit of our fellow men” as he had.

Unfortunately, Simms appears to have paid a heavy price. His death, in 1948, was self-inflicted, and he left a note complaining about overwork. But at least his buildings live on, and do so when many more recent public housing schemes have been demolished.

Even by Dublin standards, the neighbourhood of Chancery Park has a very colourful history. It used to be known as “the Pill”, an ancient name that may or may not be related to a Scandinavian term for “penis”. In any case, it once described an area where an inlet of the Liffey encroached.

In the years before 1798, Pill Lane, where Chancery Street now stands, was considered a hotbed of sedition. It was such a source of revolutionary pamphlets that the authorities spoke of the “Marats of Pill Lane”, after the French radical journalist famously assassinated in his bath.

The area was also once notorious for its slums and smelly side-streets. In the late 19th century, local businesses campaigned for a clearance, and partly succeeded. But for that, in fact, Dubliners might still be living on “the Pill” today, because the same reforms led to the name being changed, in 1896, to Chancery Street.

As with many rebrandings, “Chancery Street” was an attempt to present the area as modern and progressive. And it may well have worked, although not in the way expected. Within 15 years of the change, the nationalist politician and essayist Tom Kelly was already mocking the alleged progress.

In a series of newspaper articles, recently republished in book from as The Streets of Dublin 1910-1911, Kelly suggested the sacrifice of a fine old name had been for nothing. Most of the businesses involved were no longer in the area, he pointed out, and there were no other signs of progress. On the contrary, he wrote: "There were more trades in [Pill Lane] 16 years ago than there are today".

Kelly would be unsurprised to find there are hardly any trades left on Chancery Street now. There are only two obvious ones, in fact – the law (courtesy of the Four Courts) and crime prevention (the Bridewell). That these alone continue to thrive adds an ironic element to the restrictive hours of Chancery Park, now closed again until Monday.

@FrankmcnallyIT