2008:398 - Cope Street/Crown Alley, Dublin, Dublin

An assessment, including test excavations, took place of the Eager Beaver clothes shop site, Temple Bar, as part of a planning condition for the redevelopment of the site. The proposed development consists of the demolition of the existing structure and the erection of a four-storey-over-basement building. The site is located at the corner of 3–4 Cope Street and 17 Crown Alley, immediately north-west of the Central Bank in Dublin 2. The Eager Beaver building is a modest commercial building constructed in the 19th century. The building, formerly two separate properties, had a five-bay, three-storey front to Cope Street and a three-bay, three-storey front to Crown Alley. The basement, with a floor level situated c. 2m beneath modern street level, consisted of four brick barrel-vaulted bays supported on stone-built walls.
Cope Street is within the zone of archaeological potential for Dublin but outside and to the east of the Viking and medieval town. Cartographic evidence places the area of excavation on the eastern fringe of the developing city in the 17th century. Crown Alley, which had been a narrow alley with overhanging and irregular houses, was widened and straightened by the Wide Street Commission after the Halfpenny Bridge was built in the 1820s. Following the Wide Street Commission map, these buildings were demolished and rebuilt. Like most of the properties on Crown Alley and the north-west section of Cope Street, the buildings were specifically designed as commercial properties and warehouses to service the goods arriving from the boats on the River Liffey. Commercial directories illustrate the occupants of Nos 3 and 4 Cope Street: corn merchants (Byrne, Mahony & Co. in 1890), wine and spirit merchants (Stewart, James & Co. in 1880), and tea merchants (Michael H. Conolly in 1840 and Marcus Tertius Moses in 1870). The site was also used by leather (Michael Carroll in 1890) and paper merchants (James McDonnell in 1859). Nos 3 and 4 Cope Street continued as a commercial premises in the 20th century, being used by commercial agents, printers, the Scouts and, finally, by Eager Beaver clothes shop.
Given the site’s location within Dublin city, its proximity to the medieval city and the site of Holy Trinity Friary, located some 70m to the west, and the general deep nature of archaeological stratigraphy in the area, it was considered that there was a high potential for subsurface archaeological material on the site to about 3.5m beneath the modern street level, or c.1.9m OD. Two test-trenches were excavated by hand in the building’s cellars. Trench 1 measured 2m by 2m and was located in the first of four cellar chambers (Chamber 1 beneath No. 3 Cope Street). Trench 2 measured 2m by 1.5m and was located in the third of the four cellar chambers (Chamber 3 beneath No. 4 Cope Street). Both test-trenches were excavated against the existing cellar walls, and both were to be excavated to natural subsoil or a depth of 1.5m beneath the current floor level (to 1.9m OD), the depth of impact of the proposed pad foundations.
The excavation showed the construction phase of the buildings currently occupying the site, along with artefacts from the early to mid-19th century, but neither of the trenches identified archaeological features predating this period. The test-trenches were cut through a modern later 20th-century concrete floor surface which was laid down in a single action, apparently after 1969 when the buildings were used by printers. The concrete floor was laid directly over a brick and mortar floor in Trench 1, made when the cellars were constructed. In Trench 2 a layer of rubble, soil and brick was laid down over the brick and mortar floor, presumably to raise its level and allow an even concrete floor between the cellars of Nos 3 and 4 Cope Street. The base of the cellar wall was found to sit directly on the natural subsoil. Six objects in total were recovered from the modern deposit sealed between the 19th-century brick floor and the modern concrete floor – four fragments of modern white earthenwares (one fragment of a white hard-paste plate dating to the late 19th to 20th century, one fragment of a hand-painted pearlware teacup, one fragment of willow-pattern cup and the rim of a creamware bowl), a corroded iron nail and an abraded fragment of a green-glass wine bottle. All of the pottery and the glass date to the late 18th to early 20th centuries and are likely to have been redeposited in the rubble layer when it was used to raise the level of the cellar floor, in the mid-20th century, before a new concrete floor was laid.
An analysis of the cellar walls was also carried out, including a detailed analysis of the walls for architectural fragments, sequence of construction and phases of use. The site’s cellar is divided into four chambers; each chamber is between 2.7m and 3m wide and ranges from 8.1m to 10.5m long (the shape of the site is irregular, with the north boundary at an 80° angle to Crown Alley). The walls were built in roughly coursed shale stone, were bonded with mortar, and had occasional inclusions of poor-quality hand-made brick. The cellar walls ranged from 0.4m to 0.6m thick and are 1.2m to 1.3m high off the existing concrete cellar floor. No architecturally significant fragments were found in the cellar walls. A structural investigation of the cellar walls provided an opportunity to see behind them. They appear to have been built against the adjoining property’s cellar or foundation walls; no archaeological material exists behind them.
The sequence of construction appears to be as follows: in the early to mid-19th century, between 1820 and 1836, the existing buildings on the site were demolished and the site was reduced into the natural subsoil. The walls of the cellars were constructed, first the south wall, perhaps to serve as a retaining wall, followed by the rest of site boundary walls. Nos 3 and 4 were built at the same time, but as separate properties. The cellars were divided by north–south walls: first the wall dividing No. 3 from No. 4 Cope Street, followed by the other cellar walls, creating two cellar chambers beneath each property (Chambers 1–2 beneath No. 3 Cope Street, and Chambers 3–4 beneath No. 4 Cope Street). The cellars enclosed beneath brick vaults. The cellars were designed to hold goods for the merchants trading out of the buildings above. In the later 19th or early 20th century the cellars were adapted and changed: the apertures into the cellars were widened and sloping walls were made to make access for goods – tea, wine, corn, leather, paper – easier; a fireplace was inserted into Chamber 1 beneath No. 3 Cope Street. A new brick and mortar floor appears to have been put in place beneath No. 4 Cope Street. By the middle of the 20th century the buildings use changed again: in 1950 Bigger printers, bookbinders and stationers moved into the premises. By 1969 they occupied both Nos 3 and 4 Cope Street, having knocked an entrance between both cellars. A levelling deposit was imported into the site before a concrete floor was laid over all the cellar chamber floors. The property became the home of the Scout Shop and, finally, Eager Beavers clothes shop. The construction of these buildings appears to have removed the remains of any pre-existing structures or subsurface material over the footprint of the proposed development.
Richard Clutterbuck, Cultural Resource