The architectural historian Walsh, writing in 1973, identified a form he called the 'Chamber Street type', a style of domestic building that emerged in the 1720s in this part of the city. The label itself is telling: Chamber Street, running through the Liberties district, gave its name to an entire vernacular building type, suggesting the style was concentrated and consistent enough in this area to be recognised as a category in its own right.

The 1720s were a period of considerable speculative building activity in Dublin, as the city expanded and landlords sought to house a growing population of tradespeople, weavers, and labourers, particularly in the Liberties, which was then a busy manufacturing district outside the jurisdiction of the old city guilds. The houses Walsh describes belong to this world of practical, unpretentious construction. They were not the grand townhouses of the Anglo-Irish establishment, nor the artisan cottages of the very poorest; they occupied a middling register, built to a repeating pattern that made them economical to put up and recognisable as a type across several streets. Walsh's references at pages 6 and 100 suggest he was drawing attention to this typology as something worth cataloguing, at a time when much of this fabric was under pressure from clearance and redevelopment.

For anyone interested in early eighteenth-century Dublin housing, the Chamber Street area and the surrounding streets of the Liberties repay slow walking. The surviving examples are not always easy to date by eye, and later alterations, replacement windows, render, and modified rooflines, can obscure original fabric. It is worth looking at proportions and brick coursing where these are visible, and at the relationship between ground-floor and upper-floor openings, which in earlier Georgian terraces tends to follow a consistent rhythm. The area is accessible on foot from the city centre and is best approached without a fixed destination, allowing the streetscape to be read as a whole rather than as a collection of individual monuments.