• Niall McCullough
  

• 
  Spring 2020
  Volume 37. No. 1

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Newman House is undoubtedly the right locus for this major initiative, where there is an affinity between form and content, writes Niall McCullough about Dublin’s new museum of literature

Some places act as channels into a city’s history: in Paris, there’s the Place des Vosges; in Rome, the Via Giulia. In Dublin, the half-intact south side of St Stephen’s Green – and the Newman House complex in particular – gives some guarded insight into Dublin’s DNA. As is typical of Dublin – a city of shuddering discontinuities – the history is diffuse and more complex than first imagined, a matter of overlapping histories and re-use. Now, the urban history of St Stephen’s Green has been made considerably denser by the addition of MoLI (the Museum of Literature Ireland), which opened in Newman House in September.

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Some places act as channels into a city’s history: in Paris, there’s the Place des Vosges; in Rome, the Via Giulia. In Dublin, the half-intact south side of St Stephen’s Green – and the Newman House complex in particular – gives some guarded insight into Dublin’s DNA. As is typical of Dublin – a city of shuddering discontinuities – the history is diffuse and more complex than first imagined, a matter of overlapping histories and re-use. Now, the urban history of St Stephen’s Green has been made considerably denser by the addition of MoLI (the Museum of Literature Ireland), which opened in Newman House in September.