Some Dublin pubs are beautiful for their architecture, for the grandeur of the structure, or for their artwork. One pub has turned pub bric-a-brac into a piece of art itself. The Glimmerman in Stoneybatter has long held a reputation for being a very interesting spot for pint, but we’ve only recently come to appreciate just how intricately decorated it really is.
A lot of pubs like to cover bare walls with trinkets, dollar bills, pots and pans, pint glasses and other items they’ve sourced from customers, car boot sales, and other pubs that have closed down. Some notable examples of this would be The Hairy Lemon, Frank Ryan’s, and Fallons. They all do it very well (especially Frank Ryan’s), but The Glimmerman seems to have taken it to another level.
Every inch of the pub is covered in photos, paintings, old drink company paraphernalia and just about anything else you can think of. What distinguishes it is the fact that none of the items look familiar or as if they exist in any other pub. There’s whole companies dedicated to recreations of these kind of decorations, decking out pubs around the world with Irish style bric-a-brac. But the Glimmerman looks like a pub that these companies could visit and get ideas for a whole host of new reproductions.
Take the wall on the left of the main bar, which is covered in a huge collection of match strike books. Or the bed with likenesses of Maggie Thatcher and Charley Haughey hanging from the ceiling. Bicycles hanging from the ceiling aren’t unique to this place (we have in the past written a whole list of pubs with bikes as decorative items, and their neighbour Tommy O’Gara’s has one) but they might be the only pub to have a tandem bike in that position.
I could list out exactly what exists on the walls of every corner of this large pub, but it’s better seen and experienced for yourself. This isn’t a collection that any new bar could purchase overnight. It’s obviously been collected and curated over a few decades, culminating in this museum of odd bits and artifacts. This is a pub where you can play darts, sit beside a warm fire, take over a cubby with your mates, or just walk around with pint in hand admiring this Dublin oddity.
