News from streetsbroadandnarrow

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.

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 classic Monto, as sung by the Dubliners (among others): ‘When Carey told on the Skin-the-goat, O’Donnell put him on the boat, he wished he’d never been afloat, the dirty skite‘.

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.