The business end of the Bar

In the first of a series in which 'Irish Times' writers explore the history of the houses and areas in which they live, FRANK McDONALDlooks at his apartment building in Temple Bar, where businesses have ranged from a spice merchant to a head shop over 150 years

THE MOST extraordinary thing about the place where I live is that I was probably the first person to sleep in the building since it was built in about 1850. That happened in March 1995, when Temple Bar Properties offered new “loft-style” apartments for sale, and we queued there for a week to get the best one.

No 20 Temple Lane South (renamed The Granary for marketing purposes) had previously been a warehouse, and still has a set of loading bay doors. The 1862 edition of Thom's Dublin Street Directory, which is now online, shows that it was occupied by Adam Woods Co – "tea, coffee, spice and fruit dealers" – with a rateable valuation of £40.

The firm was obviously thriving, as its business extended into the adjoining premises on the corner of Cecilia Street and Crow Street, now a mix of offices and recording studios owned by Paddy Dunning.

“Woods, A esq” was noted as living in Dundrum, as was “Webb, John, merchant”, who might have occupied one of the upper floors.

At the time, Temple Lane was full of tradesmen of one sort or another, probably because of its proximity to Dublin Castle. No 2 housed a “hairdresser and peruke [wig] maker”, numbers 4 and 9 were occupied by wine merchants while numbers 3, 5, 10 and 24 housed printers, 19 and 21 bookbinders, 14 a bootmaker, 22 a goldsmith and 23 a tailor.

At No 25 Forster and Co were described as “engravers to Her Majesty, embossers, and cromo-lithographers” – perhaps in direct competition with Thomas Trench Williamson, at No 18 Crow Street, whose business was described as “engraver, lithographer stationer to the Lord Lieutenant” (George Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle).

William and John Wight, “merchants and colonial agents”, occupied numbers 6, 7 and 8 Temple Lane, while on Crow Street No 10 housed Thomas Hicks, a military tailor, and numbers 13 and 15 were used by heraldic engravers. There was also a “gold beater” in No 13, a “travelling stationer” in No 12 and a “scrivener’s office” in No 17.

On very short Cecilia Street, where our entrance is located, there were no less than three wine and spirit merchants, of which Cottle Co were also “rectifying distillers”. These were all next to the Catholic University’s School of Medicine, built on the “site of Crow Street Theatre Royal and anciently that of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity”.

This Augustinian friary, founded in the 13th century and suppressed in the 16th, was bounded by what is now Cecilia Street, Temple Lane, Temple Bar and Fownes Street. As archaeologist Linzi Simpson noted in her report on a 1996 excavation, its western boundary was Temple Lane, “one of the earliest lanes in Dublin, probably of Viking origin”.

The friary had been built outside the medieval walls, in what became Dublin’s first “eastern suburb”. The archaeological excavation in 1996 uncovered its eastern boundary wall, an internal arched wall and the remains of a limekiln, elements of which are now showpieces for Luigi Malone’s restaurant, in a graffiti-scarred building called The Friary.

Temple Lane is shown clearly on John Rocque’s 1759 map of Dublin, which proved to be revealing when I examined it under a magnifying glass. Not only is the site of our building shown as a vacant plot waiting to be filled with something, but also many of the other streets in the area – including the north side of Dame Street – were also in transition.

Christine Casey, in her Dublin book for Penguin's Buildings of Irelandseries, notes that Temple Lane was "formerly known as Dirty Lane" – and before that as Hogges Lane. She refers to the survival of a number of warehouses on the lane, including No 20, saying it had been "sensitively converted" in 1994 by architect Peter Twamley.

Like so much of the core of Temple Bar (bounded by Dame Street, Fownes Street, Wellington Quay and Eustace Street), our building had been slated for demolition to make way for the transportation centre planned by CIÉ in the mid-1970s – an underground rail line and central bus station topped by office blocks, hotels and shopping malls.

That didn’t happen, of course. CIÉ could have demolished every building it bought in the area, but it didn’t. Instead they were rented out on short-term leases to art galleries, alternative clothes shops, restaurants and music rehearsal studios, all of which contributed to the bohemian atmosphere that helped to save Temple Bar.

The last occupier of No 20 Temple Lane before CIÉ bought it was Stafford Mitchell Ltd, footwear wholesalers, as listed in my personal copy of Thom's Dublin Street Directory1983. The company is still in business, but no longer in the city centre – it is now based in the Jamestown Industrial Centre in not-too-distant Inchicore.

After CIÉ purchased the property in the mid-1980s, the ground floor and basement became Fat Freddy’s pizzeria – the first in Dublin with a wood-burning oven. It was sensationally good. But it had to vacate the premises so that renovation work could proceed, popping up again in Quay Street, Galway. Temple Bar’s loss is surely Galway’s gain.

The upper floors, where we live, had not been used at all. The roof had holes in it, there were pigeons living in the attic floor, and the stairs were rickety and dangerous. An occasional market used to be held on the first floor, though I can’t remember what was sold there; all I knew was that the building had been a “shoe warehouse”.

The renovation involved gutting the entire interior and then reinstating it with Columbia pine floors on timber floor structures, with a concrete layer to separate the three retail units at street level from the five apartments above. The basement was back-filled with concrete, as there was no possibility of using it, even for car parking.

It won an award from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland in 1996, with the jury noting that the architect’s brief was to refurbish “this industrial building” to provide an “appropriate vista” for the new Curved Street while converting it for modern open-plan living. “Peter Twamley has more than satisfied these aspirations,” its citation said.

We now manage it ourselves, which saves on paying extortionate fees to agents. Indeed, the Granary must be the only mixed-use building in Dublin where neither the residents nor the retailers have had to pay a cent more in management charges than they did five or six years ago. Collecting the money can be a challenge, however.

Last year, we refurbished the exterior of the building by having all 27 of its Georgian-style sash windows and heavy loading bay doors repainted for the first time since 1995 (shame on us), and replacing potentially dangerous decaying running boards beneath the loading bays – with the contractors working from a neat cherry-picker.

The cost of scaffolding would have been prohibitive (the quotation we got was for €10,000). Dublin City Council demanded €100 per day in “rent” to put the cherry-picker on the street, even though The Granary is a protected structure in a pedestrian zone. We beat them down to a more affordable €50.

Meanwhile, the Dublin Head Store on our ground floor – the original of the species – has been holding a closing-down sale. A notice on the front blames persistent negative media coverage for causing “mass public hysteria, forcing the Government to take action & close a thriving Irish company”. It is unlikely to be replaced by a scrivener’s office.