The New Road to the Sea

CHAPTER XI.

The New Road to the Sea.

Starting from the Custom House, the new road to the sea runs by Store Street, Amiens Street and the North Strand, and, crossing Annesley Bridge, reaches Clontarf. Store Street is named after the Custom House stores, erected about 1791. There was a building here, where Mabbot Street joins Store Street, marked “China Manafactuary.” The map-makers of the eighteenth century were no purists in orthography. The maps made after the embankment of the quays at the North Wall in 1717, but before the building of the Custom House in 1791 (which stands on what was called Amory’s ‘Ground), mark the whole thoroughfare “Strand “from the present North Strand to as far west as Beresford Place. One old map marks it “The Street.” The name Amiens Street supplanted the name Strand in 1800, but it appears then to have been applied, perhaps in error, to that eastern end of Gloucester Street which has recently been dubbed Killarney Street. But it was certainly applied to the present street before the birth of Charles Lever in 1806.

So rural an institution as a Pound stood on the site of the present Amiens Street Terminus a hundred and fifty years ago. The North. Strand first bears the prefix North in 1803. With Talbot Street and Amiens Street it has, since the construction of Annesley Bridge in 1797, quite superseded Summer Hill and Ballybough Road as the road to the sea, Clontarf, Howth, Malahide, Artane, Coolock, Raheny, Dollymount, Baldoyle, Portmarnock, and generally to that important, picturesque and rapidly improving coast and inland district lying to the northeast of Dublin, of which the ever-beautiful Howth is the chief ornament.

Preston Street, the short street off Amiens Street, dates from 1817. This street ran to the West Road (the present Oriel Street) before the Railway was made. So did another unnamed street from Amiens Street.

A street here, called Hart Street, of about the same date, has long disappeared. It is now represented by the street called Railway Arches, which was formerly included in Sheriff Street. The name of Inkerman Cottages indicates the date. Nixon’s Buildings, and Nixon Street not far off, are named from owners of property. Newcomen Bridge, by which the North Strand crosses the Royal Canal, is called after Sir William Gleadowe Newcomen, Bart., one of the Directors of the Canal Company in 1791.

Another Director at that time was the Hon. Richard Annesley; but it is probable that Annesley Bridge, by which the North Strand crosses the mouth of the Tolka, and used to touch until recently the innermost corner of Dublin Bay, is not called after him. Annesley Bridge was perhaps named in compliment to the first Lord Annesley and Viscount Glerawley, who was married to a sister of the powerful John Beresford, Commissioner of Revenue, who had so much to do with the development of north-east Dublin.

It will be remembered that Annesley House, on the site of the present Pro-Cathedral, stood in Marlborough Street, opposite to Tyrone House, the residence of Lady Annesley’s father and brother.

Off the North Strand is Xavier Avenue, whose name tells its origin. Opposite to it is Waterloo Avenue, another historic memorial. Nottingham Street, a name as old as 1798, had until a few years ago a large house at the corner which must have dated from that year. Seventy years ago there was a street called Noy Street near the North Strand. Like Philip Street (Summer Hill), and Booker’s Row (Custom House), its very site cannot now be found. Hoey’s Avenue, so named thirty years ago, was changed after a few years to Strandville Avenue. The new name is rather inconvenient as there is another and older Strandville Avenue in Clontarf at no great distance from the new. (Old Strandville Avenue runs from Clontarf Railway Station to the sea, which it meets at Brookside, where the Holly Brook flows into the Bay.)

But Bayview Avenue, (called after Bayview on the North Strand) which dates from the earlier thirties, was made a complete misnomer a few years after it was built; for the newly constructed Great Northern Railway shut out altogether the view of the sea The French spelling Bevue would now be more appropriate.

Aldborough House, the most considerable building in this district, fronts Portland Row and stands at the junction of that street with the North Strand, Amiens Street, Gloucester Street and Seville Place. The house and grounds form a complete and extensive block or square, fronting Portland Row, Gloucester Street, Buckingham Street, and Meredyth Place. In the roadway here, where a turnpike stood a hundred years ago, is an ornamental drinking fountain erected to the memory of the late General Henry Hall, C.B., of the Indian Army, a resident of Co. Galway. Aldborough House was built in 1796 by Edward Stratford, second Earl of Aldborough and Viscount Amiens, from whom Aldborough Place, Amiens Street and Stratford Row receive their names.

(His family also founded the town of Stratford-on-Slaney in Wicklow, in which county and those of Kildare and Carlow the family estates lay.)

At that time the North Strand had just become a very important avenue of communication between the city and Howth and Clontarf, owing to the making of the new (Annesley) Bridge over the mouth of the Tolka. Aldborough House, one of the grandest of the Dublin residences of the eighteenth-century nobility, was erected at a cost of £40,000, and was so splendidly complete, that it contained even a theatre.

(Lord Aldborough built another great house in London and died in 1801. The last Earl of Aldborough died at Alicante in Spain in 1875 when the title became extinct)

Aldborough House, Dublin, soon passed out of the hands of this family and has had a chequered history since. Shortly after the Stratfords had sold it, it became a Feinaglian School, to which Clonliffe House was an auxiliary. Aldborough House was conducted by Von Feinagle, whose system of education, relying principally on the exercise of the memory, had then a great vogue in Dublin. Feinagle died here in 1819. In maps of Dublin, dated in his time and for long after wards the great house is marked “Luxemburgh,” of which Grand Duchy Feinagle was a native. It was afterwards a military barrack, being the headquarters of the Commissariat Department, and is now a branch of the General Post Office. That department of the public service is to be commended for the care it has shewn itself prepared to take of this fine old structure and its surroundings.

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