Chapter Place

Originally called Mitre Alley, the name was changed to Chapter Street by the Corporation in 1869.¹ An old street, Rocque shows it as ‘Myter Alley’.²

’Chapter’ comes from the chapter or Chapter House of the adjoining St Patrick’s Cathedral.

Although Chapter ‘Street’ was the official name – it’s listed as that in Thom’s from 1870 until 1898 – it was also known as Chapter ‘Place’ and Chapter ‘Lane’ at various times.

As early as 1876 it was called ‘Chapter Place’ in an advertisement for the sale of land owned by Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,³ and that’s the name M’Cready cites.⁴ Even he was confused, as he suggests that ‘Chapter Street’ never existed even though it was listed in Thom’s.

Chapter Place appears on the 1907 Ordnance Survey,⁵ so we can take it that the change from ‘Chapter Street’ to ‘Chapter Place’, happened sometime in the late 1890s.

The men of the DMP, however, preferred the name Chapter ‘Lane’,⁶ as did a report of 1922 in which the houses were described as ‘extraordinarily wretched’.⁷

That same year the Evening Telegraph says that ‘Mitre Alley’ is ‘now called Chapter Place’.⁸

In 1898 Thom’s gives it as ‘Chapter Lane’, until 1910, when it adopted the ‘Chapter Place’ moniker.

The street disappeared some time after 1935.⁹

1. Dublin Evening Post, 1 November 1869. ↩︎
2. Rocque, 1756. ↩︎
3. Irish Times, 25 September 1876, p. 8. ↩︎
4. M’Cready, p. 20. ↩︎
5. OS 25”, 1907. ↩︎
6. Dublin Daily Express, 2 February 1888, p. 6. ↩︎
7. Freeman’s Journal, 4 February 1922, p. 3. ↩︎
8. Dublin Evening Telegraph, 13 December 1922, p. 3. ↩︎
9. OS 6”, 1954. ↩︎