Nicholas Avenue

Nicholas Avenue, running west from Church Street to Bow Street, was formerly called Bedford Street, named for John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford, Lord Lieutenant from 1756-61,¹ and Chancellor of the University of Dublin (Trinity) from 1765-71.²

The street is shown unnamed on Rocque, but is listed in Harris’s work of 1766.³ It is shown on a map made for the City surveyor in 1781.⁴

In 1895, the Corporation’s Paving Committee reported that:

‘Your Committee had under consideration a memorial largely and influentially signed, praying that the name of Bedford Street may be changed to Nicholas Place, because the street was formerly the resort of bad characters, which gave it an objectionable notoriety; but now that all is changed, there being no tenement houses there, but each house in the street is let to a separate tenant, and portion of the street is occupied by the Father Mathew Temperance Hall.’⁵

The name ‘Nicholas Place’ was proposed to ‘commemorate the name of Father Nicholas’, a priest who worked in the area, but as there was already a street of that name , the Committee settled on ‘Nicholas Avenue’.

1. M’Cready, p. 7. ↩︎
2. Patrick Walsh, and David Murphy, ‘Russell, John’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.007837.v1). ↩︎
3. Walter Harris, The History and Antiquities of the City of Dublin, from the Earliest Accounts (Dublin, 1766). ↩︎
4. Robert Lewis, A map of ground formerly part of Oxmantown Green, called Loughboy… surveyed in March 1781 for Mr Thomas Mathews, City Surveyor (Dublin City Library & Archive).
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5. Reports 1894/201. ↩︎