It is a working edge of the city, practical and plainly built, and its age sits quietly beneath the surface of the everyday traffic and warehousing that has long defined it.

The quay was constructed around 1716, according to architectural historian John de Courcey, whose 1996 study of the Liffey remains one of the key references for the river's built history. The date places it firmly in the period when Dublin was expanding rapidly southward and its port infrastructure was being formalised and extended. Quays of this era were typically built to consolidate the riverbank, replacing the muddy, irregular shoreline with a continuous masonry edge that could accommodate commercial shipping. Rogerson's Quay formed part of that broader project of ordering the tidal river and opening it to sustained maritime trade.

The quay runs roughly between the eastern end of the city centre and the point where the Liffey begins to widen toward the bay, and it can be reached easily on foot from Pearse Street or along the riverside path from the Custom House direction. The fabric of the quay itself is not showy; what rewards a visit is the sense of accumulated time in a stretch of waterfront that has not been heavily reimagined for tourism or leisure. The industrial grain warehouses and commercial buildings along this stretch have seen various degrees of conversion and vacancy over the decades, and walking the quay gives a clearer sense of how the port once functioned than many better-documented sites further west along the river.