Today the crossing of Westland Row and Pearse Street is threaded with traffic, tram lines, and the ordinary noise of a city in motion, but beneath all of that lies a history that the streetscape gives no indication of whatsoever.

According to historian John De Courcy, writing in 1996, the area before 1710 comprised a brickfield of approximately two hectares, a working site where raw clay was dug, shaped into bricks, and fired in kilns. A brickfield, in the simplest terms, was an open-air industrial operation, typically combining clay extraction pits with rows of drying moulds and one or more kilns for firing the finished product. Two hectares is a substantial footprint, roughly the size of four or five football pitches, and its location this close to what would become one of Georgian Dublin's principal axes suggests the site may have supplied material for the wave of brick construction that transformed the city through the eighteenth century. Dublin's Georgian terraces, with their characteristic red and brown brick facades, required a vast and steady supply, and local brickfields like this one would have been essential to that effort.

There is nothing at the site today that marks its former use, and a visitor arriving at the Westland Row and Pearse Street junction will find a busy urban corner rather than any kind of dedicated heritage feature. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in the act of imagining the ground itself, specifically the layers of industrial activity compressed beneath pavements and foundations. Pearse Street station is nearby, and the surrounding area rewards a slow walk for anyone interested in the physical grain of pre-Georgian Dublin, when the city's edge was still close and its industries were operating openly on what would later become prime urban land.