Richmond Barracks

Richmond Barracks was built in 1810 against the threat of a French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars, and it became one of the largest British Army barracks in Dublin. Nearly every British regiment passed through it on the way to the Crimea, the Boer War and the First World War. After the Easter Rising of 1916 it held over three thousand suspected rebels before their sentencing, which is what makes it a centrepiece of the fight for independence rather than a footnote to it. It passed to the Free State Army in 1922 and spent the rest of the century as working-class Dublin: a housing estate, then a Christian Brothers school.

Major refurbishment finished in 2016. The building now holds Inchicore Library, a communal garden with a letter sculpture called A Walk, a café, and Culture Connects, a year-round programme of cultural activity built with the people who live around it. Goldenbridge Cemetery, Ireland’s first garden cemetery and Daniel O’Connell’s, sits alongside.

Walking tours chart the building as a barracks, as a site of 1916, and as a cornerstone of the neighbourhood; they are booked ahead. Open Monday to Saturday from 10am, closed on public holidays. It is run by Dublin City Council Culture Company.