News from streetsbroadandnarrow

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.

The entry for James Joyce Street took a while to write. Apart from the two changes in the name of the street, the extent of the street took a little time to work out.

Originally it went from Frenchman’s Lane to Railway Street, but from the mid-1900s the Beresford Place end was called Store Street.

I haven’t found any evidence that explains this.

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 streets were laid out.

I’d love to hear from anyone who knows more about the origins of the names.

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 of the streets laid out on Love’s Charity Ground, another interesting name that has been lost.

The trustees of Love’s Charity owned the the area from Ballybough Road to Jones’s Road, and they were still the landlords when the GAA bought the City Racecourse – Croke Park – in 1913.

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 tenement Dublin, and in particular the Monto area, in miniature.

The impetus for people to change the name of the street may sometimes seem frivolous, but there were/are real-life consequences for people if the area they live in gains an ‘evil reputation’.