House - 18th/19th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Molesworth Street occupies a curious place in Dublin's Georgian fabric, running between Kildare Street and Dawson Street in the south city and long associated with the professional and political classes who congregated near Leinster House.
Among its terraced properties, No. 33 is one of the quieter survivors, a dwelling that has stood since around 1740 and that tends to pass without remark beside more celebrated Georgian addresses nearby.
The architectural historian Maurice Craig, writing in 1969, drew attention to the building in his survey of Dublin's built environment, recording its approximate construction date of c. 1740 and placing it within the broader mid-eighteenth-century development of this part of the city. That period saw considerable speculative building in the streets radiating south from the old city core, as Dublin expanded rapidly under the influence of the Wide Streets Commissioners and the ambitions of landed and mercantile interests. A house dating to around 1740 predates much of the grander Georgiana that later came to define the area, placing it in the earlier phase of that transformation, when the street's character was still being established rather than consolidated.
The building sits on the north side of Molesworth Street, a short walk from the National Library and the gates of Leinster House. Because it is a building in continued use within a working streetscape rather than a preserved monument, there is no formal access or visitor arrangement. What can be appreciated is external: the proportions, the fenestration, and whatever survives of the original brickwork and detailing at street level. Craig's reference gives the building a scholarly footing that its relatively modest appearance might not immediately suggest, and for anyone interested in the layers of ordinary Georgian Dublin that survive beneath later alterations, that context is worth carrying along on a walk down the street.