The recent anniversary of the death of Michael William Balfe, on 20 October, prompted me to look into the history of one of the two streets named after him, Balfe Street, off Grafton Street.
Balfe is remembered in the street name and in the name of the bar in the Westbury Hotel, and also in a street in Walkinstown; I’ll get to that another day.
What connects the Dubliners, the Phoenix Park Murders, and the name of a laneway in Ballybough? The latest entry is for Hughes’s Avenue, Ballybough, which originally bore the name ‘Carey’s Lane’. It was changed because of the notoriety of James Carey, the informer, even though it had no connection with him. Carey features in the…
Listening recently to a episode from the Napoleonic Wars Podcast about Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz prompted me to write up the entry for Railway Street, Mecklenburgh Street being one of its previous names. It turned out to be more complicated than I expected, but the history of the name of the street is the history of…
Reviewing some draft posts, I posted the entry for Doon Avenue and some nearby streets in Cabra. The derivation of the names of the streets is not clear, but it looks like three of the names derive from places in Donegal, and two from the name of the house, on the grounds of which the…
With Drury Street in the news recently, I thought I’d write up the history of the naming of the street. And let’s say that I’m sceptical – to put it politely – of the idea that the Drury in question is Sir William Drury, who died in 1579.
Passing by Cadogan Road, Fairview, the other day, I was reminded to look again at possible origins of the name. It turns out that there is an obvious one in the person of George Henry Cadogan, 5th Earl Cadogan, who served as lord lieutenant around the time the street was built. Cadogan’s mother was Mary…
The opprobrium that attached to the moniker lane led to to many streets being renamed in the 19th century, and one of those was Love Lane, off Ballybough Road. I think Love Lane is a great name, and much better than the more prosaic Sackville Avenue, which replaced it in 1874. Sackville Avenue is one…
