Temple Bar

THIS TIME I USED A CANNON 5D MkIII

Today I could not get the GPS unit on my Canon 5D to function correctly so when I thought I had solved the problem I visited Strand Street in order to test it. Unfortunately it was intermittent but when I got to the end of the street I decided to purchase a pack of batteries and much to my surprise replacing the battery resolved the apparent problem.

There is also a Little Grand Street, off Capel Street, which could be described as a continuation of Great Grand Street. While the street appears to be nothing more than an ugly back land it may well become much more important when Liffey Street and Capel street become fully pedestrianised and because a large nomber of hotels are expected to become operational within the next year or two. Also the area in general is becoming an alternative to Temple Bar on the other side of the river.

Strand Street formed part of the Jervis Estate formed by Humphrey Jervis, Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1681-3, who laid out the area around Saint Mary’s Abbey after buying much of this estate in 1674. Jervis developed a network of streets arranged in a nine-square grid, including Jervis Street, Stafford Street (now Wolfe Tone Street), and Capel Street, as well as building Essex Bridge.

The Strand Street Institute was built in 1868 by John McCurdy for the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), at a time when working and middle class education was being promoted throughout the country in the form of working men’s clubs and institutes like this one.

The nineteenth-century meetinghouse is bounded to the north, east and west by modern late twentieth and early twenty-first-century apartment blocks and offices, each matching the tall height of the meeting house. It is an important building to conserve on this street where twentieth-century buildings threaten the historic eighteenth and nineteenth-century industrial character. The building’s unique identity is preserved in the overall form and fenestration layout and through the retention of a number of important roof elements such as the timber eaves brackets. The quality of the rubble stone walls which, while not cut or shaped, have been drawn to regular courses, stands as a testament to the engineering of local craftsmen.