Beneath its 1824 stonework lie the foundations, literal and historical, of at least two earlier places of worship, each built upon the memory of the last.

The earliest recorded building on the site was demolished in 1504, a period when late medieval Dublin was still very much a walled, compact city. A parish church dedicated to St. Paul was established here in 1697, part of the broader effort to provide Anglican places of worship following the Reformation's reshaping of Irish religious life. That seventeenth-century structure was a galleried church, meaning it had internal balconies running along the upper walls to accommodate larger congregations, a common arrangement in Protestant churches of the period where the spoken sermon rather than the altar was the focal point. By 1821, however, this building had fallen into a ruinous condition, and the present Gothic Revival structure was completed in 1824 to replace it. Gothic Revival, popular in the early nineteenth century, drew on the pointed arches and vertical emphasis of medieval ecclesiastical architecture as a self-conscious return to what reformers considered a more authentically Christian aesthetic.

The church sits within the south city, and while its exterior is broadly visible from the street, the layered history underfoot is less immediately apparent. Visitors with an interest in the longer arc of Dublin's urban development may find it worth pausing to consider that the ground here has held some form of religious building for over five centuries, each iteration reflecting the political and denominational upheavals of its era. The 1824 building itself is documented on the Fitzgerald Map of Dublin and in several mid-twentieth-century architectural surveys, which remain useful references for anyone wishing to read further into its fabric and context.