2005:423 - 32–40 BENBURB STREET, DUBLIN, Dublin

From at least 1728, the site was the location of the Bull Yard, which later became the Pipe Office Yard (as depicted on Rocque in 1756) and later again the Pipe Water Stores (as evidenced on the first edition of the OS). The yard appears to have occupied that vacant plot between the Bowling Green and the Royal Barracks. The yard was used to store pipes immediately prior to their use throughout the city. Throughout the 18th century, the pipes carrying the city’s water supply were hollowed-out elm or fir trunks, mostly felled in Scandinavia. They were floated across to Dublin Bay and up the river to a slip located in a man-made cut in the riverbank just to the south-east of the site.
The cut is evident on Brooking and was probably under construction at the time of the survey. The same year (1728), the city made provision to construct a new pond ‘where the little pond now is’ on the southern side of the Bull Yard ‘in order to preserve the city timber therein’. It was to be 70ft from east to west and to extend 40ft in from the existing shoreline. In addition there was an agreement to allow ‘free ingress and regress with men horses and carriages to and from the Artillery Yard and in through the Bull yard’.
The pond, however, was insufficient to hold the amount of timber being imported. A report in 1735 suggested that the sheds in the Artillery Ground were ineffectual in preserving the pipes, that ‘the timber and pipes are very much dampnified by the sun and wind splitting the same, which not only have made some of them useless, but occasion many pipes that are laid down to decay much sooner than otherwise they would’. It was proposed that a proper basin be constructed ‘at the watering place near Barrack Street’, which is the one depicted on Rocque’s map. The city then disposed of the city stables and yard on Barrack Street in 1750, retaining the Pipe Office Yard.
The area must have been quite busy. In 1746 a consignment of timber consisting of 800–900 yards of ‘good round fir . . . 10 feet to 14 feet long, 15” to 18” diameter exclusive at the butt end’ was awaited from Norway (Gilbert, ix, 198), while the same year a consignment of 50 tons of round elm timber was landed at Barrack Street. Rocque depicts timber in several of the yards in the area, suggesting significant quayside activity.
Rocque depicts in some detail the layout of the development site in question, which extends to the west of the Pipe Office Yard. Six structures are shown fronting onto Barrack Street south of the Pipe Office Yard, two pairs of which are adjoining and have returns extending from the rears. The entrance to the yard is directly opposite Ellis Street and the lane marked on Brooking’s map accessing Oxmantown Green is still in place, with an access point through to the Artillery Ground in the northern range of buildings. The buildings forming the pipe office yard are arranged in a rough U-shaped plan around a central yard.
Within the site footprint to the west of the yard was a laneway extending towards the open ground to the west of the Artillery Ground. Six houses are depicted along the western side of the laneway, with a common backyard accessed through an arched entrance from Barrack Street. The present site boundary forms the western boundary of the yard, with the gateway still evident in the same position today.
The four buildings depicted south-west of the Pipe Office Yard probably conform to the Dutch Billy plan, being built against each other and possibly sharing common chimney stacks. The buildings further along Barrack Street are more difficult to classify and do not appear to have survived into the 1830s, when the original survey was undertaken for the OS.
The houses along the laneway to the west of the site are interesting on the basis of their depiction on the first edition of the OS. While their depiction on Rocque’s map suggests that they are simple cabins, by the 1830s some demolition had taken place, revealing several corner fireplaces, suggesting that they were possibly more substantial.
The OS was carried out c. 1837 and published ten years later. The most interesting difference in the intervening years is the planting of a garden in the north-eastern corner of the yard, along the line of the northern range of buildings depicted on Rocque’s map. The structure immediately to the west survived, however, and is depicted here as a single-storey lean-to, with three pillars supporting the roof structure. A more substantial square-shaped structure survived immediately to the west again, while the principal building was located along the eastern boundary wall.
In the middle of the 19th century, Benburb Street appears to have been the focus of a thriving community. Of the 66 houses on the street in 1850, only two were unoccupied. Two more were tenements, but the remainder were occupied by an array of traders and retail premises. Most of these houses have since been demolished. The building development on the site during the 19th century can be traced on the subsequent OS revisions. More changes are indicated on the proposed development site on the revised edition OS map of 1907–8. The site of the Pipe Water Stores had by this time been replaced by a cooperage, which was composed of a number of large rectilinear structures arranged around two yards in a roughly U-shaped plan. The building plots fronting onto Benburb Street also differ from those shown on the first-edition map. Barrack Street and Tighe Street were joined in 1890 to form the present Benburb Street.
On the basis of the relatively rich historical information available for the Pipe Office Yard, it is disappointing that there was so little archaeological evidence for its existence in the five trenches excavated. The 0.6m differential level between the eastern and western portions of the site would suggest that significant ground reduction took place over the former, possibly in the early 20th century. It is possible that the material was removed for its high gravel content to provide hardcore or fill for construction sites elsewhere.
The extraction of the underlying gravel possibly continued piecemeal over a significant period, with the resultant holes being used for refuse disposal in the 1970s.
Even where the ground was not reduced (over the area investigated by Trench 1 to the west of the site), there was little evidence for the area’s occupation, with the exception of a fragment of a fireplace belonging to one of the houses on the western side of the laneway west of the Pipe Office Yard. The houses here are, in plan form at least, different to the majority of smaller domestic structures depicted by Rocque, most of which have the characteristic twin return to the rear. The surviving houses had retained their rectangular plan by the 1830s, with the characteristic corner fireplaces evident where they had been retained in exterior walls to the north, and, in the case of the fireplace exposed during the test-trenching, with the fireplaces surviving either side of a free-standing wall.
The houses along the Benburb Street frontage appear from the cartographical evidence to have constituted examples of the typical brick, gable-fronted buildings which were still evident throughout the western side of the city until the 1950s. The presence of relatively modern brick within the demolition rubble would suggest that the buildings had long ago lost their gables and indeed it is possible that many more of these buildings from the late 17th or early 18th centuries still survive around the city disguised in this fashion.
One of these houses appears to have had a garden to the rear, on the basis of a localised deposit of cultivated garden soil in Trench 1. The specific area in question is depicted as a yard by Rocque and had been built upon by the 1830s. Rocque does not depict many domestic gardens in this area of the city, the only examples being slightly to the west of the site off Dawson’s Yard. The fact that there is a tennis court depicted immediately adjacent to the three houses in question may suggest the presence of a small middle-class enclave in an area that had a considerable connection with the river.
While Flood Street and River Street are depicted just to the south-west of the site on the opposite side of Barrack Street, many of the backyards have stockpiles of timber, which may or may not have been destined for the Pipe Office Yard.
The general impression given by Rocque is that of a city still in expansion, with Oxmantown Green encircled by development and large underused land banks still open for development further west in front of the Royal Barracks. While the Pipe Office Yard’s location to the very west of the city may have been a function of the city’s bringing water in from the weir at Islandbridge by 1742 (Gilbert, ix, 32–3), it was unfortunate that at this stage Dublin was expanding to the east and there was little further development in this part of the city until the social housing schemes of the late 19th century.
Reference
Gilbert, J.T. and Gilbert, R.M. (eds) 1889–1944 Calendar of ancient records of Dublin, in the possession of the municipal corporation of that city. 19 vols. Dublin.