The pedestrian spine between Trinity College and St Stephen's Green, with buskers who are frequently very good and shops that are mostly the same as everywhere.
The street
Pedestrianised since 1982, running about 500 metres uphill from Trinity College to St Stephen’s Green, and it is the most expensive retail rent in Ireland.
What is on it is largely international chains, plus Brown Thomas, the department store, and Weir’s, the jeweller, which have both been there long enough to count as institutions.
The buskers
The genuine reason to walk it. Grafton Street busking is competitive, licensed by the city, and the standard is high — Glen Hansard played it for years before Once, Damien Rice and Bono both did time on it, and the current crop includes people who are demonstrably better than a lot of ticketed acts.
Pitches are allocated, amplification is restricted by byelaw after complaints from residents, and there is an etiquette about time limits between acts.
Late afternoon and early evening is when the good ones are out. Christmas week is when the famous ones turn up unannounced.
Bewley’s
Bewley’s Grafton Street Café is the building on the street that is actually worth going into: a 1927 café with Harry Clarke stained-glass windows, mahogany, and a room upstairs that functions as a theatre at lunchtime. It has closed and reopened more than once and the windows alone justify a coffee.
The lanes, which are the point
Turn off Grafton Street and the shopping gets interesting immediately.
Creation Arcade and Johnson’s Court, a lane of jewellers leading to the Powerscourt Centre.
Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, a 1774 Georgian mansion converted into a covered arcade of small shops, cafés and a good antiques floor. It is the nicest interior of any shopping space in the city.
George’s Street Arcade, a Victorian red-brick market hall from 1881 — secondhand books and records, vintage clothes, a fortune teller, a very good sandwich counter. This is where to spend the time.
Drury Street and Fade Street, the independent end: Irish designers, coffee, and the best of the newer restaurants.
South William Street for bars.
Henry Street
Across the river, the other main shopping street, which is where a lot of Dubliners actually shop and is markedly cheaper. Moore Street running off it is the old fruit-and-veg market street with the traders still calling, now also the centre of Dublin’s West African and Asian food shops, and one of the more genuinely changing streets in the city.