ADOOR opens, and a herd of cattle comes spilling out of the grand old Georgian house, splattering smelly cow dung as they go. A Hollywood producer cruises past, in his tinted Mercedes limo. Some time later, Kevin Spacey charges along, waving a gun, and Johnny Depp roars up on a Harley-Davidson.

Dublin's Henrietta Street is the most often-used film location in the country and if you decided to land a spaceship here the residents might not pause for a second glance. Movie stars are just part of the scenery. Number seven even boasts Dublin's first independent film studio. But Henrietta Street is no ordinary street.

Right from the moment that Luke Gardiner conceived of it, back in 1721, this was intended to be a special street. The houses were designed as town palaces for the Anglo-Irish ascendancy: five lords, a bishop, a judge and Gardiner himself had homes here and ladies who leveed played hostess to the cream of Irish society in the very grandest of splendour to be seen at the time.

However, following the Act of Union, the posh folk gradually moved out and Dublin's poorest moved in. The spacious palaces were carved up into hundreds of slum dwellings and the tone of the neighbourhood was lowered, somewhat. In the Seventies, the last of the tenement dwellers was relocated, and a new kind of tenant took over the decaying houses. Henrietta Street, with its gloriously crumbling Georgian architecture and picturesque cobblestones, became Dublin's most artistic street. New York had Greenwich Village, London had Covent Garden, Paris had Montmartre, but we in Ireland had our very own artist's haven, right here in the middle of town.

Fergus Martin is terrified of rats. Phobic. But being an artist, he can't afford to be too choosy. There is, after all, a tradition of artists living and working in places where normal people would refuse to stay. Warehouses and lofts became a mecca in the New York of the Fifties and Sixties for artists who couldn't afford to rent anywhere else and who needed space and natural light for their work. They weren't fussy about smells or noises or rodents. And they put up with cold water and colder rooms and with walking up six flights of stairs, if they had to, in order to be able to afford to make art a viable career.

(But then Andy Warhol came along and made it the hippest thing in the world to be an artist and live in a loft, and now those same abandoned warehouses fetch thousands of dollars a month.)

Fergus is among more than three dozen artists living and working in Henrietta Street now, in huge, chilly rooms with ancient floorboards and no central heating. He's just been given the use of a new studio, and he's thrilled to bits with it, heating or no heating.

"The light in here is fabulous," he says. "It's my very favourite kind of light." The landlord offered to clean up the pigeon shit, before Fergus moved in, but he wanted to do it himself, "so that I could get a feel for the place". Fergus lives on the top floor, in a white attic room, with white sheets hiding the bed and white washing hanging up to dry. There's a hole in the window, but he doesn't mind, it's good for drying clothes. His new studio is white too and he's wearing white. "I'm a minimalist," he says.

On the wall there are white canvases. We discuss the possibility that he might just leave them the way they are, and let the walls be the art. The walls are white too, but full of holes, like pock-marks and little details, like a metal arm for a gas lamp and a rusty old stove. In which Fergus not only found pigeon shit, but also a discarded paperback book called The Lex of Sex. He hoped it would be a filthy read, but found it disappointing. "I know why the last bloke put it in the fire!" he says.

The lifestyle here is austere, and quite removed from the world outside. It is possible, Fergus says, to be so wrapped up in your art that you forget not only what day it is, but what season too.

"I'm on another planet, entirely! Once, I was working on an exhibition and I wandered down to Henry Street and saw all these Christmas lights and people with bags. I had completely forgotten it was Christmas!" Fergus moved to Dublin from Milan because he knew he could rent a dump very cheaply here. But even now that he's a member of Aosdana and is making some money, he wouldn't leave.

"There's a certain not-grown-up quality about living like this. It's a magical way of life. But I do like to leave work, at the end of the day. Which is what is so fantastic about coming to this new room. But I can tell you the stench of the pigeon shit was revolting!"

Part of the attraction for the artists is the anonymity of the street, the peace and quiet. But what attracts the film-makers, too, is this feeling that nobody lives here. Walking up and down, most days, the street looks ghostly, as though all of the houses have long been abandoned. A dirty net curtain flutters in the window of the Socialist Worker headquarters, in number five, but that net curtain was placed there for effect, by a film's prop department. And on days when filming is happening there are large crowds, generators, catering trucks, all kinds of disturbances. But for most of the people who live here, the filming is a source of entertainment and delight. Fergus doesn't mind being kept awake at all.

"Oh, no, I love the filming. I was in bed one night and I heard a generator, and I thought, 'Jesus, I can't sleep, this is driving me mental!"' So I went down to tell them off and discovered that they had turned the King's Inns into an 18th-century Paris street, for a film of a Henry James novel. And I thought, 'Jeepers, not sleeping for a couple of hours one night is irrelevant. This is pure magic!"'

Just at this moment, as Fergus is enthusing about the movie-making, a woman appears, carrying a boom mike. It occurs to me that she must be part of a film crew. But no, she's an artist called Kathleen O'Brien and she lives upstairs. Fergus introduces me, says I've got to see her studio, it's out of this world.

Kathleen makes coffee, in tiny red cups. She's been outside, recording construction noises for a sound sculpture. She also makes sculptures out of unusual objects. One of the sculptures is made of silver forks, hundreds of forks, soldered together, and another one is made of spoons, with watch faces stuck to them. She's lived on this street since 1976. Her room is homely, filled with plants and interesting objects.

"When I first lived here," she says, "it was a lot more animated. A horse that was brought into one of the houses went straight through the ceiling and died."

A horse?

"Yes."

Why was a horse brought in?

"The man was a scrap dealer and he used to have bonfires in the middle of the street. And one day he brought his horse up to the very top of the house and it fell through the ceiling. After it died, it was just left there."

Henrietta Street had a reputation as one of the most dangerous of the Dublin slums for much of the last century. James Joyce mentions it as being a singularly miserable place. What is now the Piobairi Uilleann building was once a brothel.

"There was a murder in the basement, where the horse died, some time later," Kathleen adds, enigmatically. "The house where the murder was always had a red bulb in the hallway and the door was always open."

Nowadays the characters are more sedate, the colour comes mainly from the paintings. Kathleen misses the madness, but she wouldn't leave.

"I love the energy of the place, the proportions, the light, the scale, the colour of the walls, where the paint has been worn away; everything about the place has elegance. As the buildings age, the beauty intensifies."

Daniel McKeon, next door, paints very colourful, trippy canvases. He too makes me coffee in his studio, which is freezing. My phone rings as we chat, and I apologise.

"I don't use mobiles," he says. "I don't trust them. Don't trust microwaves either."

He also doesn't trust the gentrification of Dublin's slums. "Just recently, two of the buildings on the street have been bought by compulsory purchase order, so from the artist's point of view we are nervous, because we don't know what the future will be for them. If they get developed commercially, will our studios be threatened?"

We are joined at this moment by Greville and Yvanna, who own a gallery called ArtSelect, in Temple Bar. They plan to stage an exhibition of the work of Henrietta Street artists in their gallery next month, and they want Daniel to take part. He lights the fire. "After a while it does heat the room," he says. If it wasn't for this place, would it be difficult to find a cheap studio? I ask.

"Yes, definitely, since the property boom. And when the artists moved into Temple Bar, they made it trendy, which then led to property prices going up."

It must be difficult to make a living as an artist?

Yes it is. When it's not going well, it can be very frustrating. But I've been an artist nearly all my life, so what else can I do? I sometimes make money, but not a lot. It isn't fashionable to say it, but it's like a vocation. But I've never been into material things particularly." Is it difficult for you, I ask, when you see other artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin making millions?

"Well, what he's doing is very different," Yvanna says.

"And they're pretty good sales people," Greville adds.

"I don't actually starve," Daniel says, laughing. "And Ireland is a lot better now, since the Celtic Tiger, a lot more people are buying art. Which is a newish thing here."

Who's buying art?

"All kinds of people. A real cross-section."

What kind of prices does he charge?

"Maybe three to five thousand for a larger work."

So a bit more than a sofa.

"I think people are buying art in the same way that they are buying furniture," Yvanna says. "If you have a three-thousand-pound couch, why not get a three-thousand-pound painting? As opposed to just a cheap print."

Don't people generally find galleries intimidating?

"Not our gallery, we're friendly. We play music and we have a sofa and give you cups of tea and chat to you, we're aiming at the new kind of art buyer." Why not open up the studios to the public and cut out the middle man? I say. Greville and Yvanna look worried. Daniel is dubious.

"Well, there's the insurance for a start. What if somebody falls down the stairs?" he says. The others are relieved.

Do the artists hang out together and get drunk? Is there a scene? "I gave up drinking a couple of years ago. I only go out sporadically. That bohemian, mad thing is less in evidence now in the art world."

They don't take drugs? I'm disappointed. I wanted this to be a scene. Like Warhol's Factory.

"No. But when I was younger, I did take things. Maybe every artist should have taken LSD at some point, it changes your perception," says Daniel.

Now he relies on flashbacks for inspiration?

"Yes! Taking drugs is self-destructive, so you can't keep doing it!"

GREVILLE and Yvanna have to go next door now, to meet some artists in the basement of number five, so I follow them. Which is just as well, because there's no doorbell, so they have to shout. Louise Peat opens the door and says come in, she'll make us some tea.

Louise and Julie Barrett met at art school. Louise has got a very impressive canvas, covered in red feathers. It looks like a chicken was splattered all over it. Julie's in the back, painting with knives and so is Martin Shiels, a graphic minimalist who works in watercolours and doesn't spill paint on his clothes.

"We're not like the Temple Bar scene here," says Louise. "We're all individuals, but we're talking to Greville about having an exhibition of all the artists on the street. I think it's a great idea. It's very important to encourage each other."

Are artists competitive?

"Of course! Whenever there's an exhibition on, there's always groups of artists standing around saying, 'I could do better'! You think actors are bad, artists are a million times worse."

I meet Tony Rudenko on the steps of number six. I'm tired and freezing and I want to leave, but he wants his photo taken, so we pose together on the steps. "I'm Ukrainian, and the only representative of the Royal Ballet in Ireland," he says. Are you going to do a pirouette for the photo? I say.

"No, I bloody well won't do a pirouette."

Tony's an artist as well, and lives in the basement. Says he was in films as well, lots of films. He wants to know if I'm going to write about the negative aspects of the street, the satanism and voodoo and nasty goings-on. I'm intrigued, naturally, and arrange to come back and see him the next day.

Next day he admits to having had a few brandies when we last met. Now he's sober and utterly charming. Has kindly postponed his swim in Howth, for our chat. "Mick and Charlie Cullen are both Aosdana", Tony says. "Charlie Haughey brought that in." Mick and Charlie Cullen work in number six.

And you're a ballerina, I say.

"No. A ballerina is a lady. I got the Ninette de Valois bursary at the Royal Ballet. I loved it to begin with and then I got to hate it. I had to really fight my corner, because of being Irish."

But you said you were Ukrainian.

"My grandparents were Ukrainian. I was born here. After that I went to Manhattan and by the time I was 21 I'd been to all the major capitals." He's painted always.

"People like Charlie and Mick have said they are quite good," he tells me. "Wayne Sleep has one, and Miranda Iveagh had some at Farmleigh and Sheridan Dufferin had some." Sean Connery came to dinner with Miranda Iveagh and mistook Tony for the Earl. He looks and talks like a Guinness heir.

"I've lived in Henrietta Street on and off for the last 20 years," he tells me. "I was one of the first people to move in with Charlie and Mick." You moved here in 1974, what was it like? I ask.

"Oh, it was heavy. There was always a heavy gang hanging around and they would set fire to rubber tyres and roll them up and down the street. Eventually that building went on fire. And in the house next door, there was another old guy, who got murdered. As it turned out, he was only 25, but he was so covered in grime that he looked 125. It's not dangerous now. Other than gossip."

How many of the people on the street does he know?

"I know everybody. I get on with everyone else. It's very supportive. And here the standard is very high, which is why newcomers have arrived, they think that it's going to help them, the talent that's here. But talent is a God-given gift. So it's not going to help you get it if you come and live here!"

I'm very disappointed, I say. I'd planned to move in and become an artist.

An exhibition of work by the artists of Henrietta Street opens at ArtSelect, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, on Thursday, June 13

Victoria Mary Clarke 2002