The church has cycled through several afterlives, including a stint as a lighting shop, before becoming part of the Pearse Lyons Distillery complex. Beneath all of this accumulated repurposing lies a question that cartographic evidence has never fully resolved: whether the medieval parish church that preceded it stood on exactly this spot, or somewhere slightly to the west, on a plot closer to the corner of Steeven's Lane and Bow Lane West.

The parish of St James the Apostle is one of Dublin's older medieval foundations. Land was donated by a Henry Tirel around 1190, and by 1192 the church had been granted to the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr, an Augustinian house near Dublin, as a parish church. The parochial boundaries were fixed during the episcopate of Archbishop John Comyn, running from Newgate in the east to the lands of Kilmainham in the west. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, records show the rectory's modest income leased to a chaplain named John Butteler for life, without rent. A replacement church built in 1707 collapsed in 1761, and the building that stands today was designed by Joseph Welland, previously architect to the Board of First Fruits and later to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and built by Thomas Henry Carroll. When the de Gomme map of Dublin was drawn in 1673, the church appears on a plot that does not quite align with the present structure, which has led researchers to suggest the medieval building may have occupied ground slightly to the west. Archbishop Bulkeley had already described the church as ruined during his visitation of 1630, so whatever stood in 1673 was presumably the post-medieval structure. The church was deconsecrated in 1963 and united with St Catherine's parish to the east. Among those buried in the graveyard is Toby Butler, who played a role in framing the Articles of Limerick in 1691; his monument was recorded as ivy-grown as far back as 1948. The graveyard also had its own curiosities: cut-paper ceremonies were once observed there during St James's Fair, though the precise nature of these rituals appears not to have been recorded in any detail.

The church stands on James's Street and is now part of the Pearse Lyons Distillery, which has incorporated the building into its visitor offering, making the interior more accessible than it was for much of the twentieth century, when it was noted as very rarely open due to the absence of a sexton. The graveyard wraps around three sides of the structure and retains some sixteenth-century burials. Anyone interested in the question of where the medieval church actually stood would do well to compare de Gomme's 1673 map, held by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, with John Rocque's 1756 survey of Dublin, which shows the church and graveyard from a later vantage point. The tower lobby once contained a mural tablet dated 1691 to 1693, and the arcading between the nave and the south aisle was considered by at least one mid-twentieth-century observer to have some architectural merit, even if the building overall was described, with some bluntness, as unpretentious.