2011:206 - LIBERTY HOUSE, RAILWAY STREET, DUBLIN, Dublin

Monitoring of engineering test pits was carried out in June 2011 in advance of the Liberty House Part Demolition and Redevelopment Scheme. The site is in the centre of the partially demolished Liberty House complex and the northern part of Liberty Park. Fifteen engineering test pits were monitored. Natural subsoil was encountered between 1.6m and 3.2m below the surface, and generally comprised grey gravels at the water-table and a band of pale brown boulder clay at a depth of 1.6–1.9m. This band of clay was only encountered in locations where 19th-century basements were absent. Elsewhere, the monitoring programme identified the remains of backfilled basements and other 19th-century material remains. The trial pit monitored in Liberty Park exposed modern disturbance down to 1m in depth.
The Railway Street/Foley Street/Corporation Lane area formed tidal mudflats or fields until the post-medieval period, and there is no evidence from cartographic, historical or archaeological sources that the site was occupied prior to the 18th century. Excavations at an adjacent site by Teresa Bolger (Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd) in 2003 identified numerous early–mid-18th-century cut features filled with unusual industrial waste (Excavations 2003, no. 571, and 2004, no. 582; 03E879), perhaps associated with the glasshouses that operated along Eden Quay and the World’s End Pottery nearby. Although Bolger felt that features extended to the west towards Gardiner Street, it is possible that similar material also extended to the east and survives below Liberty House, despite not being picked up in this limited monitoring programme.
The site was developed in the late Georgian period (1790s), during which the site footprint was densely packed with small properties as part of a later phase of the Gardiner Estate. Several of these had associated basements that were identified in the monitoring programme on Railway Street, Elliot Place and Faithful Place. Based on the monitoring results, these structures are in poor condition and of limited archaeological interest, and are associated with much later material culture. Although originally constructed as single-family dwellings, most of these small houses became, in the mid-19th century, the core of the notorious red-light district known as the ‘Monto’. The archaeology of the Monto would be a fascinating and worthwhile study, but unfortunately the 19th-century remains of the Monto on the Liberty House footprint were badly disturbed when they were demolished in the 1930s to make way for the Liberty House complex, and those groundworks caused significant disturbance to the site.

Archaeology Plan, 32 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2