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.
The name
These were manors outside the walls of medieval Dublin that held their own jurisdiction — liberties — exempt from the city’s authority, with their own courts and their own rules. The Liberty of St Sepulchre belonged to the Archbishop; the Earl of Meath’s Liberty was the largest.
The practical consequence was that people who could not or would not operate under city guild rules came here. In the seventeenth century that meant Huguenot weavers fleeing France, who made the area a silk and wool centre — the Weaver’s Square name survives, the industry does not.
What happened to it
The textile collapse in the nineteenth century turned the Liberties into one of the worst slums in Europe. Georgian houses built for merchants were subdivided into single-room tenancies; the 1911 census records families of ten in one room. Two tenements collapsed on Church Street in 1913 killing seven people, which forced the first serious housing reform.
Then a century of clearance, flats, and decline. And then, in about the last fifteen years, the fastest change of any part of Dublin: student housing, hotels, the distilleries returning, and rents rising sharply on people who have been there for generations. That tension is live and audible if you talk to anybody.
What to see
St Patrick’s and Christ Church cathedrals are both here or on the edge.
Marsh’s Library, beside St Patrick’s, is the oldest public library in Ireland, opened 1707, and is entirely unaltered — dark oak stalls, chained books, and three wired alcoves where readers were locked in with rare volumes. It is small, it charges very little, and almost nobody goes.
The distilleries — Teeling, Roe & Co, Pearse Lyons, Dublin Liberties — and the Guinness Storehouse at St James’s Gate.
The Liberty Market on Meath Street, indoor, Thursday to Saturday, and Meath Street itself, which is the last old-Dublin shopping street of its kind — butchers, a fish shop, religious goods, and the accent.
Newmarket square, with the weekend food market.
St Catherine’s Church on Thomas Street, outside which Robert Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1803.
Eating and drinking
The Fumbally, a café in a warehouse off Clanbrassil Street that helped start the neighbourhood’s food scene.
Lucky’s and The Old Royal Oak for pints.
Leo Burdock’s on Werburgh Street for chips, since 1913.
The walk
Christ Church → Marsh’s Library → St Patrick’s → Meath Street → Newmarket → Teeling → Thomas Street → Guinness. That is about ninety minutes at a stroll and it is the best walk in Dublin that is not on any list.
More Neighbourhoods
Temple Bar
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.
Stoneybatter
Two-up two-down cottages built for cattle drovers, now the most self-consciously fashionable neighbourhood in the city and still, mostly, itself.