Charleville Mall

On the Royal Canal, running from Newcomen Bridge to Clarke’s Bridge, Charleville Mall was laid out in the 1820s. By 1829 it was developed enough for houses to be advertised for letting. Described has having the ‘double advantage of a town and country residence’, the fact that the street was outside the City was a selling point.¹

The earliest appearance on a map (that I can find) is 1836.²

In 1900 the Corporation’s third public library was opened in Charleville Mall, and in May 1941 the houses at the Newcomen Bridge end were damaged in the ‘North Strand Bombing’.³

I haven’t found any direct evidence for the name, and the only connection I can find is with Sir John de Blaquire, a director of the Royal Canal Company, after whom one of the bridges over the canal is named: De Blaquire was MP for Charleville (1790–97).⁴

However, although the street name plate gives the Irish version of the name as Meal ‘Ráth Luirc’ (a ‘local name’ for Charleville, County Cork⁵) the official Irish version is ‘Meal Charleville’, which might suggest that it derives from a person of that name.⁶

1. ‘Charleville Mall’, Saunders’s News-Letter, 24 September 1829, p. 4.
2. W.B. Clarke, Dublin; published under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London, 1836).
3. https://northstrandbombing.ie/
4. James Kelly, ‘de Blaquiere, Sir John’ in Dictionary of Irish Biography (https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.000733.v1).
5. https://www.logainm.ie/en/12021/.
6. https://www.sraidainm.ie/en/1382460