Among its less-celebrated survivals are early eighteenth-century dwellings recorded opposite number 54, buildings that have slipped past the notice of most architectural surveys and yet represent something quietly significant: domestic construction from a period when this part of the city was still finding its shape.

The historian Maurice Craig, in his 1969 study of Dublin's buildings, notes these structures at page 327, placing them among the early eighteenth-century fabric of the street. Craig's work remains one of the foundational references for Dublin's architectural history, and his brief mention is enough to fix the dwellings in the record, even if the detail is sparse. The eighteenth century in Dublin was a period of considerable building activity, particularly in the decades after 1700 when the city's population was growing and speculative development was pushing northward and westward from the older quarters. Modest domestic rows of this era were typically built in brick, with plain facades and relatively simple internal arrangements, and many have been altered, subdivided, or demolished over the intervening centuries. That any early examples survive on Prussia Street at all places them in a category of buildings that endure largely through luck and the inertia of continued occupation.

Prussia Street is accessible by bus from the city centre, and the stretch around number 54 is easily walked. The buildings are residential rather than ornamental, so there is nothing to enter and no site to manage; what a visitor is really doing here is reading a streetscape. It is worth arriving with Craig's note in mind and looking carefully at the scale and proportions of what remains opposite that number, comparing it with the later Victorian and twentieth-century infill that characterises much of the surrounding area. Early eighteenth-century domestic buildings in this part of Dublin tend to sit slightly lower and narrower than their later neighbours, with detailing that is restrained rather than decorative. The differences are subtle, but once noticed they become a way of reading the whole street as a layered document of how the city grew.