North Dublin

MAIN STREET IN SWORDS

Today I walked along Main Street in Swords and photographed at random. At the end near the castle there appeared to be three gangs of youths preparing for a gang fight so I decided to return home but a number of them decided to board the bus and had a conflict with the driver but eventually he managed to stop them boarding only to have a similar problem at the next stop.

Main Street is a metonym used to denote a primary retail street of a village, town or small city in many parts of the world. It is usually a focal point for shops and retailers in the central business district, and is most often used in reference to retailing and socialising.

The term is commonly used in Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and Canada, and less often in Australia and New Zealand. In the non-Scottish regions of the United Kingdom, the common description is High Street, though “Fore Street” or “Front Street” is commonplace in some parts. In Jamaica the term is Front Street. In the 1950s awareness about the ‘main street’ as a concept of its own importance emerged in the urban studies field, attaining the attention in the theoretical discussions of postmodern urban design, neo-traditional planning and meta-urbanism.

In many places, the street name for such a street is actually “Main Street”, though even where it isn’t the actual name, “Main street” is still used to describe the main thoroughfare of the central business district. The “Main Street of America” branding was used to promote U.S. Route 66 in its heyday.

Main Street is the place/road name used in many suburbs, towns, and villages in Ireland. For example, the OSI North Leinster Town Maps book lists sixteen Main Streets and only two High Streets in its thirty-town index of street names. Similarly, the OSI Dublin Street Guide, which covers all of Dublin City and County Dublin, lists twenty Main Streets and only two High Streets. Killarney and Galway are two of the few Irish towns in which the term High Street is used instead of Main Street. Recent and upcoming tranches of funding for Local Authority-led projects seek to help regenerate Main Streets, and town and city centres around Ireland under the URDF (Urban Regeneration Development Fund) and RRDF (Rural Regeneration Development Fund).

List of businesses on Main Street in Swords:
​AB Formal Footwear
Abbey Travel
ACME Blinds
Aesthetic Training Acad
AIB
AJ Electronics
Alpha Print
Andrea Eve Beauty
Apache Pizza
Baby Scan
Bank of Ireland
Biofresh
Boyle Sports
Brian D O’Brien
Cab 2000
Café Tara
Camera Cabin
Caprice Beauty Care Plus Pharmacy
Centra
China Link
CM Beauty
Colourtrend
Cross Care
Dillon’s Hair Salon
Diva Hair
DMF International
EBS
Euro Giant
Everest Kitchen