Beresford Lane

Beresford Lane, which runs down the side of the old Labour Exchange, formerly Trinity Church, on Lower Gardiner Street, was originally called Moland Street.

The street appears to have been constructed in the late 1780s or early 1790s; it’s named on a map of 1798, shown as including all of Frenchman’s Lane, that is on both sides of Gardiner Street.¹

(Campell’s map of 1811 shows Moland Street as being what became Talbot Street, but it is mistaken).²

Moland Street first appears in Wilson’s directory in 1795³ and is listed until 1839, when it makes its last appearance in the directories.

The first reference to its current name is in 1869, when Thom’s lists ‘Beresford Place Lane’ as the location of the Trinity Church Female School.⁴

Trinity Church was built in 1838, but I suspect many, many, more Dubliners, as the author did, thanked the Lord as they entered its doors during its time as a Labour Exchange, from 1921⁵ to 2003.

The name ‘Beresford’ derives from the nearby Beresford Place.

1. Modern Plan of the City of Dublin, shewing all the recent improvements, engraved for William Wilson (Dublin, 1798).
2. Thomas Campbell, Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin (Dublin, 1811), reproduced in Irish Historic Towns Atlas, Dublin, Part III, 1756 to 1847, map 6.
3. Wilson’s Dublin Directory for the Year 1795, in The Treble Almanack for the Year 1795 (Dublin, 1795).
4. Thom’s, 1869.
5. Ciaran Clancy, ‘Gardiner Street Employment Exchange: The historical background and development’, Dublin Historical Record, xliii, no. 1 (1990), 47–51.