House - 18th/19th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Somewhere along Barrack Street on Dublin's southside, a banqueting house once occupied a corner of what was known as the city pipe yard.
The pipe yard was part of the urban waterworks infrastructure that supplied the city, and the presence of a banqueting house built into its corner is the kind of detail that raises more questions than it answers. Who dined there, and under what arrangement, is not recorded, but the combination of civic utility and formal entertaining in the same compound points to the layered, sometimes improvised character of early eighteenth-century Dublin.
The earliest documentary reference to the structure comes from a lease dated 1724, cited by historian John de Courcy in his 1996 work on the Liffey. By that point the building was already significant enough to warrant formal legal mention. A map drawn by John Rocque in 1756, the most detailed survey of Dublin produced in that period, may show the structure as a large building occupying the corner of the pipe yard on Barrack Street, though the identification is tentative rather than certain. Rocque's map is an invaluable record of mid-eighteenth-century Dublin, capturing the city at a moment of considerable expansion, and the presence of such a structure in his survey, if confirmed, would place it among the more intriguing ancillary buildings of the period.
The street is now known as Benburb Street, running along the northern edge of the Liberties area near the former Collins Barracks, and the physical fabric of the pipe yard is long gone. There is nothing visible at the site today that corresponds to the banqueting house, and any attempt to locate it precisely would require close study of Rocque's map alongside current street layouts. For anyone with an interest in Dublin's early modern water infrastructure or the social geography of the city before the wide-street commissioners reshaped it, the de Courcy reference is worth tracking down directly. The 1756 map itself is held in several collections and is widely reproduced, making it possible to look at the relevant corner of Barrack Street and consider what may once have stood there.