Cobbled lanes, a serious cultural quarter, and the most expensive pints in Ireland. Worth an hour in daylight and worth understanding before you spend an evening in it.
What it actually is
A few cobbled acres between Dame Street and the river. It was earmarked for demolition in the 1980s — the transport authority had bought up the buildings for a bus depot — and the low rents in the meantime filled it with artists, studios and record shops. The plan was abandoned in 1991 and the area was redeveloped as a cultural quarter instead.
That is the part people miss. Temple Bar contains the Irish Film Institute, the Gallery of Photography, Project Arts Centre, the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, the Ark children’s cultural centre and Smock Alley Theatre. It is a genuine arts district that happens to have a stag-party economy bolted onto its main square.
The two versions
By day it is pleasant. Cobbles, galleries, the Temple Bar Food Market on Meeting House Square on Saturdays, the Book Market at weekends, and coffee. An hour here is a good hour.
By night, on the main stretch, it is loud, extremely expensive, and largely populated by visitors and hen and stag parties. The pubs are handsome and the music is amplified covers rather than sessions.
Neither version is a con. They are two different products and the second one is priced for people who will come once.
Where Dubliners drink instead
Four minutes’ walk in almost any direction:
The Long Hall on South Great George’s Street — Victorian, mirrored, unaltered.
Kehoe’s on South Anne Street, with the snugs.
Grogan’s on South William Street, for the toasted sandwich and the paintings.
The Palace Bar on Fleet Street, technically on the edge of Temple Bar and a proper old pub.
The Stag’s Head off Dame Lane.
Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street, which has a claim on the best pint in the city.
What to actually do here
The Irish Film Institute — arthouse cinema, a bar and a bookshop in a converted Quaker meeting house.
Meeting House Square, with retractable umbrella canopies, for the Saturday food market and outdoor screenings.
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, free, with working artists’ studios above.
Cow’s Lane for independent design shops and a Saturday market.
The Icon Walk, a lane of murals of Irish cultural figures.
Practical
It is small — you can walk the whole quarter in fifteen minutes — and it is between Trinity College and the Ha’penny Bridge, so you will pass through it whether or not you plan to.
Weekend nights it is genuinely crowded and the noise carries. If you are choosing accommodation and you value sleep, stay somewhere else and walk in.
More Neighbourhoods
The Liberties
The oldest surviving neighbourhood in Dublin, outside the medieval walls and outside the city's jurisdiction, now full of distilleries again after a century without them.
Stoneybatter
Two-up two-down cottages built for cattle drovers, now the most self-consciously fashionable neighbourhood in the city and still, mostly, itself.