St. Luke's Church of Ireland parish church was consecrated on 8th October 1716, survived as a place of worship for well over two and a half centuries, and then endured a fire in 1986 that left it a ruin. What remains is an unusually legible ruin, one where the various additions and alterations of successive generations are still visible in the fabric of the walls, and where a carved stone cross on the west gable continues to mark the building's purpose to anyone passing on the street below.

The church's origins lie in a administrative reorganisation of 1708, when the parish of St. Nicholas Without was divided and a portion assigned to the new parish of St. Luke's. A glebe house, the residence provided for a parish vicar, was erected on the Coombe, and the church itself was built close by between 1715 and 1716. Its construction was overseen by Thomas Burgh, who held the position of Surveyor-General of Ireland at the time and is also thought to have been the building's designer. Burgh was among the most significant architects working in Ireland in the early eighteenth century, responsible for a number of major public buildings in Dublin. The church he produced was a four-bay nave lit by segmental-headed windows with cut limestone surrounds, keystones, and sills. Subsequent decades brought incremental changes: a flat-roofed porch was added to the north side around 1880, a rectangular apse was attached to the east gable between 1889 and 1890, and the cut granite bellcote surmounting the west gable, with its carved stone cross, was added around 1900. The building closed as a place of worship on 19th September 1975.

The ruin sits in the Liberties area of Dublin's south inner city, accessible on foot from the nearby Coombe. Enabling works for conservation and conversion to office accommodation commenced in September 2016, so the degree of public access to the structure itself will depend on how that project has progressed. Even from the street, the west gable and bellcote are visible, and the successive layers of the building's life, the Georgian core, the Victorian additions, the fire damage, and the conservation work, are legible to anyone who pauses long enough to look.