It is not the kind of detail that makes it onto heritage plaques, yet the ground on which St Andrew's Church stands in Dublin's south city was, before it became sacred, a place of leisure, an open green used for the bowling that was fashionable among the urban population of seventeenth-century Ireland.

The story is recorded by the historian John T. Gilbert in his multi-volume history of Dublin, published between 1854 and 1859. According to Gilbert, in April 1670 the parish resolved to build a new church on what the records call "the old bowling-green," a plot of land donated by Henry Jones, the Bishop of Meath. The design was to follow an oval model drawn up by a William Dodson, with costs met through subscriptions and local parish assessments. The site had already accumulated considerable layers of history before a single stone of that church was laid. It had previously been associated with the Nunnery of St Mary de Hogges, a medieval religious house whose footprint is noted on the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map and on the 1892 OSi City of Dublin sheet 57. A seventeenth-century iteration of St Andrew's Church and its graveyard also preceded the current building, which dates to the nineteenth century and is now deconsecrated.

The building itself stands on Suffolk Street in central Dublin, and is today perhaps best known as the home of Dublin Tourism's visitor centre, which means it is relatively easy to find and freely accessible. Those who know what they are looking for might take a moment inside or around the exterior to consider the compressed archaeology of the place: medieval nunnery, seventeenth-century church, bowling green, a newer church built to an oval plan, and now a civic facility. The oval geometry that William Dodson proposed in 1670 gives a faint clue that something unusual shaped this building from its origins, though the layers of subsequent construction have long since absorbed whatever green and open quality the site once had.