Over the years I've bought the contents of pubs all over Ireland. Sometimes it's because a pub is closing. Sometimes it's changing hands. Sometimes a family simply decides it's time to clear a building that has been in their ownership for generations. People often imagine that buying the contents of an old pub is all about finding valuable antiques, and occasionally it is. Every now and then you'll come across a rare mirror, an unusual advertising sign or a piece of furniture with an interesting history. But that's rarely what stays with me.
What stays with me are the ordinary things. The faded photograph that has hung behind the bar for forty years. The old advertising mirror that nobody remembers putting up. The handwritten notice pinned to a wall decades ago. The collection of odd bits and pieces that slowly accumulated over generations. Those are often the things that tell you the most about a place.
One thing I've learned after spending years clearing old pubs is that no two are ever quite the same. On paper they can look identical. Two Victorian pubs, built around the same time, serving the same community. Yet when you start looking around, the personality of each place begins to emerge through the objects it contains.
Over the years I've bought the contents of pubs from all over Ireland, and if I dont have an immediate new home for it such as a pub or collector client, much of it ends up in a storage unit in Ballymount, Dublin. Looking around that unit is a bit like walking through dozens of Irish pubs at once.
The photograph accompanying this article shows part of the storage unit. It is filled with objects rescued from pub clearances and collections across Ireland. Guinness mirrors, whiskey jugs, brewery signs, old photographs, ledgers, advertising pieces and countless other items all found their way there over the years.
In many ways, it is a halfway house for these things. They had left the pubs they had called home for decades and were waiting for a new home somewhere else. Some would eventually find their way into other pubs. Others would end up in home bars, restaurants, hotels or private collections around the world. But for a while they all sit together in Ballymount, carrying little pieces of Irish history with them.
I often found myself wandering through the aisles and thinking about where everything had come from. A mirror that had hung behind a bar for fifty years. A whiskey jug that had sat on a shelf through generations of landlords. A photograph that had witnessed countless conversations and celebrations. Each object had a story long before it arrived in that storage unit.
One pub might have walls covered in local sporting photographs. Another might be filled with musical instruments and memorabilia. A third may contain nothing particularly valuable at all, yet somehow feels like a museum of local life. That's because the contents of a pub are rarely chosen all at once. They accumulate over time. A photograph is gifted by a customer. A mirror arrives from a brewery representative. An old sign survives a refurbishment because somebody can't bear to throw it away. Over the years the building begins to collect stories.
In many ways, traditional Irish pubs were never designed by interior designers. They were shaped by the people who used them. That is one of the reasons old pubs feel so different from modern bars. You can reproduce the timber panelling. You can install vintage style lighting. You can even recreate the layout. What is much harder to recreate are the layers of history. The photographs. The notices. The souvenirs. The objects that arrived one by one over decades and somehow stayed.
I've often found that the most interesting thing in a pub isn't the most valuable thing. Many years ago, while clearing a pub, I found an old photograph tucked behind a mirror. Nobody seemed to know who the people in the picture were. It had probably been hidden there for decades. Financially it was worthless, but historically it may have been one of the most important objects in the building. That photograph represented real people who had once stood at that very bar, had conversations in that very room and been part of the story of the pub.
Objects like that remind me that pubs are about far more than architecture or decoration. They are repositories of memory.
The best Irish pubs often feel timeless because they contain traces of the generations that passed through them. A worn counter polished by thousands of elbows. A collection of photographs documenting local weddings, sporting victories and community events. A vintage Irish poster advertising something long forgotten. An old mirror that has quietly watched a century of conversations. Taken individually, these objects may not seem particularly important. Together, they create something that is impossible to manufacture...character.
Perhaps that's why I've always been fascinated by the contents of old pubs. Every object raises questions. Who put it there? Why was it kept? What stories would it tell if it could talk? Sometimes the answers are known. Often they are not. Yet somehow the objects survive and, in surviving, preserve small fragments of Irish social history that might otherwise have been lost.
The same is true of many of the old Irish prints and vintage Irish posters that I come across. Most were never intended to become decorative pieces or collectors' items. They were simply everyday objects designed to advertise a product, an event or a place. Nobody imagined they would still be hanging on walls generations later, yet somehow they survived, carrying a small piece of Irish history with them.
The older I get, the more I realise that the real value of these things is not monetary. It's historical. It's emotional. It's human. The contents of an old pub are rarely just objects. They are the traces people leave behind and, if you spend enough time looking closely, they tell the story of a place every bit as well as the building itself.
To me, that's where the real magic lies.
At Rare Irish Stuff, we specialise in antiques, collectibles, Irish prints, vintage Irish posters, brewery advertisements and pub memorabilia inspired by the objects, stories and traditions of Ireland's historic pubs.
