Famously, Ulysses takes place over the course of a single summer’s day, 16 June 1904, known as Bloomsday. Among Joyceans, its commemoration has become an annual event: they don Edwardian costume, read from Joyce’s novel and follow the journeys taken through the city by its central characters: Jewish ad man Leopold Bloom and the young bohemian and reluctant teacher Stephen Dedalus. Aside from being a tribute to Joyce’s book, these Bloomsday activities provide a carnivalesque method of exploring the city in a different way.



A couple of years ago I was writing a non-fiction book about Dublin, and, perhaps inevitably, found it difficult to avoid writing about Joyce. One of the aims in writing the book was to uncover uncommon paths that I could follow through Dublin, enabling me to view my home city from unusual perspectives and, if possible, to discover the place anew. I wondered whether an alternative Joycean trip through the city was possible: visiting all 20 of the author’s homes in chronological order in a single day.

The day I chose in mid-January was icy and grim. I began at Joyce’s birthplace, 41 Brighton Square, a substantial red-brick house in a terrace overlooking a wedge-shaped park.



Attached to the façade of the house is a rusting plaque erected in 1964 by Dr Frederic H Young of Montclair State College, New Jersey. Disturbed that there was nothing to commemorate Joyce’s connection to the building, Dr Young raised funds, had the 35lb bronze plaque manufactured in Newark, then carried it on a flight to Dublin. At 4pm on 16 June he stood on a kitchen chair to deliver a speech to the hundred or so people who had gathered in the front garden.

At that point, Bloomsday was only getting started, along with Dublin’s now-thriving Joycean heritage industry. Brighton Square was the third Joycean plaque in Dublin; others would accrue over time. On 16 June 1954, 10 years before Dr Young’s ceremony, the Dublin Joyce Society, which counted among its members the writers Brian O’Nolan (also known as Flann O’Brien), Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh, held a pilgrimage to mark the 50th anniversary of the day depicted in Ulysses. They hired two horse-drawn carriages to bring members between locations mentioned in the novel. In 1962, the society opened a Joyce Museum at the Martello tower in Sandycove, in which the opening episode of Ulysses is set. (The towers were built along the coastline as defensive structures during the Napoleonic wars.)

Joyce’s father, John, began as a man of some means and ended up poor. The moves he and his family made around late 19th and early 20th century Dublin describe a tightening spiral from wealth towards poverty – from the leafy red-brick suburbs of Rathgar and Rathmines, to the comfortable coastal towns of Bray and Blackrock, and then into the shabby, poor north inner city.

James Joyce Tower, in the village of Sandycove. Photograph: Richard Cummins/CORBIS

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus, whose family have made an identical move to the Joyces, finds Dublin city “a new and complex sensation”. Joyce went on to thoroughly mine this patch of crumbling Georgian Dublin, making it, in his fiction, a meticulously imagined and painstakingly researched world.

After the family’s relocation to the north inner city, Joyce attended Belvedere College, a Jesuit-run school on Great Denmark Street. Every address at which the Joyce family lived after 1893 is within reasonable walking distance of the school: a tall brick house near the North Circular Road; a semi-detached in Drumcondra that was knocked down in the late 1990s and replaced with a squat apartment block; a three-storey house on North Richmond Street, the street on which his short story Araby begins; four houses in Fairview, one of which has been demolished; a terraced red-brick near the Mater Hospital, its street number changed at some point in the past; a two-storey redbrick beside the home ground of Bohemians FC; and a small house tucked into a terrace a short walk from O’Connell Street.

My mid-January walk took me to all these houses, and – breaking my plan to stick to chronology – to a couple of addresses on the North Circular Road at which Joyce stayed when he returned to the city for the final time. (After he left Dublin in 1904, Joyce came back on just three occasions: 1909, 1910 and 1912.)

The journey had taken me to 17 of Joyce’s 20 addresses when day turned to night. It was dark, cold and I was running out of time. I took a bus from O’Connell Street and visited a house on Shelbourne Road where Joyce had lived for much of 1904. I then strolled to Dromard Terrace, Sandymount, where Joyce had stayed on the night of 16 June 1904– the day he and Nora Barnacle walked along the nearby strand on their first date.

I took a train to Sandycove and proceeded in the direction of the tower, which stood on the horizon bathed in the glow of floodlights. This was the last address on my list – Joyce stayed here in September 1904. After reaching the tower, I turned and headed home, my day-long odyssey around Joyce’s Dublin homes complete.

Although the tower at Sandycove marked the end of Joyce’s time as a resident of Dublin, that end also signalled a beginning: of Joyce as a writer, of his life with Nora. And the peripatetic life Joyce had lived in Dublin never really ended: he went on to occupy 10 different addresses in Trieste, eight in Zurich and 19 in Paris.