Foster Street – Ballybough Road

Foster Street was the name given, until the 1890s, to different parts of Ballybough Road. M’Cready gives 1849 as the date, but it appears as early as 1832 in a newspaper report, applied to the houses to the north of Clarke Bridge, as far as to what is now Foster Terrace.¹

The first entry in the street directories is in 1834, with two houses recorded.²

Confusingly, the first and later editions of the OS give the name Foster Terrace to the houses, but this is contradicted by various other sources.

As the Love’s Charity lands, on the west side of Ballybough Road, were developed in the second half of the 1800s, the name was applied to further sections of the road.

By 1886 Thom’s, under the main heading ‘Ballybough Road’, lists numbers 1 to 6 as ‘Edwards Terrace’; then numbers 7 to 42, as far as Poplar Row, and then numbers 42 to 57 on the east side, as ‘Foster Street’.³

From 1890, Thom’s dropped the use of the name and listed all the houses on both sides of the street under ‘Ballybough Road’.⁴

However, the name ‘Foster Street’ lived on as late as 1898, when ‘a plot of ground in Foster Street at the corner of King’s Lane known as 68 and 69 Ballybough Road’ was offered for sale.

As to the origin of the name, it could derive from John Foster, as does Foster Place, but I can find no evidence one-way or the other.

1. ‘In bankruptcy’, in Saunders’s News-Letter, 3 December 1832, p. 4.
2. Pettigrew & Oulton, The Dublin Directory for 1834, p. 169.
3. Thom’s, 1886.
4. Thom’s, 1890.
5. ‘In the High Court of Justice in Ireland’, in Irish Independent, 27 July 1898, p. 8.