It’s not as though we’ve never done it before, you know. One of the most celebrated pieces of world literature, James Joyce’s The Dead, opens with a description of guests arriving for the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Where? In a rented apartment over Fulham’s cornfactors at 15 Usher’s Island. Living and partying over the shop is something we know how to do. In Borris, Co Carlow where I grew up, the publican, the butcher, the bank manager, all lived over the shop. Now in the middle of a housing crisis, I drive through the centre of country towns or villages and see dark and empty first and second floors and wonder why?
In Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, 10 O’Leary children, of which my father was one, grew up over O’Leary’s shop on the main street. The first floor, or the drawingroom floor as Jane Austen would have called it, was where the piano was. My Aunt Mollie remembered her mother playing dance tunes and Mollie and her sisters and friends dancing a figure dance called the schottische. They hardly knew how to pronounce a schottische, she said, let alone perform it, but it sounded like something out of a novel and they knew people could hear the music and the fun down in the street “and we thought we were great”.
Graiguenamanagh is a proud town, built around the 13th century Abbey of Duiske. All along Main Street and the streets off it, big families were raised over the shop. Life and music and children’s voices filled those spaces. Yet now, hardly a dozen people live on Main Street. Most upper floors are empty.
An exception to that rule is Pat Doyle who, with his wife Kyra, has brought up three children living over their pub, Mick Doyle’s on Main Street. It’s a pub grocery with all its old wooden fittings, the sort of place you can walk into on your own and you’re made feel welcome. Pat has music in the pub at the weekends. Twice a month, in a stage space in a converted tannery out the back he has had big names from Jack L to Brian Kennedy to Gemma Hayes perform.
Graig is a river tourist town with a busy caravan park but, apart from the excellent Waterside Guesthouse, it’s not always easy to find accommodation, and Pat is converting the upper floor of a Main Street property he has bought for short term letting. He himself grew up over the pub and loved it. He could walk everywhere. There were always other kids in the street to play with. “I can’t imagine living out the road. Small business people have to be close by, have to be on site.”
Living over the shop brings life and community into the centre of the town, he says. But is it noisy when the pubs are busy at night? “I have never been woken up by noise. Anyway double or triple glazing soon sorts that.”
In Kilkenny city, Pat Crotty and his wife Pamela decided a few years ago to move in over a family business property in the centre on High Street. They had lived in a big house in the suburbs but their children were now reared and gone. “When we were all young families, everybody knew one another. Kids are the link between people. But now we were at a loose end. So we sold the house to help the kids pay their mortgages.”
[ The nationalist tobacco shop that hosted James Joyce and Arthur GriffithOpens in new window ]
He was worried that his wife would miss her garden but she now says: “We should have done it years ago.”
Pat, who is chief executive of the Vintner’s Federation of Ireland and a son of the late Kieran Crotty who was a popular local TD and chairman of Fine Gael, says: “We open our front door and meet everyone we know. Everyone calls by, knocks on the door as they pass. Nearby is the bakery, the butcher and newsagent. There’s no need for a car.” If they want a walk, they come out their door and within two minutes they are in the stunning gardens of Kilkenny Castle on the banks of the Nore.
He says it wasn’t cheap to convert the first-floor space into a two-bedroom apartment. There was a lot of work to satisfy fire and planning regulations and heritage considerations. But Pat was lucky in that there was a separate hall door and stairway to the apartment. He says it is not necessarily more expensive than building on a green field site when you take into account that water and electricity are already connected. And then, he says, there is the bigger picture.
“The Government is spending a fortune on housing and ignoring this option. You’d need fewer cars. You’d help keep existing school buildings in town centres more viable instead of having to build new ones out in the suburbs.” And he says, more people living in the centre supports small local shops and makes streets safer at night.
In fairness, there is a bewildering number of grants and initiatives to bring life back to dead streets but they are confusing and often difficult to navigate.
Is there something else though, something in our culture that despises towns, a belief that green fields and leafy suburbs are superior to city streets?
Maybe, and local Senator Malcolm Noonan of the Green Party notices that new arrivals from places like India and Bangladesh use the city space better, their children play in the streets. But he says the empty spaces in town centres aren’t there by accident. “The rezoning frenzies of the noughties destroyed town centres and created out-of-town shopping centres.” Developers, he said, were rubbing their hands with glee as they turned farmland into gold. “We turned our backs on the town and it became more attractive to live on the periphery.”
Living over the shop won’t house everybody. But what if it offered youngsters simple and central accommodation; older people and empty nesters an escape from suburban isolation; and a community of residents to bring a reassuring presence and their custom to town and city streets and shops? People all over Europe do it. Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love with our towns again.
