In this chapter we will study how the working class lives, socialises and reproduces itself in Ireland’s two great proletarian texts—The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Glass Canoe. In the Home Beautiful and the Southern Cross Hotel, workers create concrete places within which a working-class political economy based upon concrete connection, meaningful work and the suspension of competition can at least partially unfold. Exclusionary, localised, watered by alcohol and linked aesthetically to the struggles of indigenous peoples against colonisers, these two locations embody a potent spatial power that is capable of challenging abstract space within their borders. However, many of the same features that allow this domination of place mean that they cannot be used as a platform from which to command space. The alcohol that provides a connection to the concrete proves self-destructive; the localism makes the Home Beautiful and Southern Cross almost impossible to scale; and, most broadly, the lack of an anti-capitalist project renders these places fragile defensive emplacements highly vulnerable to the forces traced in Chap. 6 .