S1451 Anti Social

This is a decent sized pub, in a modern building - but a pub existed in the previous building on the site. This is relatively common across Dublin, with quite a lot of buildings replaced in the 1990s and 2000s - and I suspect we're going to see a number of new premises retaining the old format licence numbers of the old pub they replaced in the current building boom. Mostly hotels, probably.

Most recently, this was "The Bayno", a quite modern pub named after a much older thing - the Iveagh Play Centre, founded in 1909  and which received this nickname as a corruption of the archaic term bean-fest. The Beano comic - which still exists - that anyone of my age will probably have bought as a kid - is most likely named after this term also. A book on the history of the Iveagh Play Centre came out in 2009 but appears to be out of stock everywhere, including second hand sites.

However, a nice local history reference name doesn't keep a pub going, and there were some problems along the way, and the pub closed in about 2014. And it sat there, closed but licenced, until 2019 when work started on the premises and rumours abounded that the people involved in Bingo Loco were to reopen the premises. And in February 2020, they did.

I visited on a weekend evening, and the pub was busy. Very busy. To the point that the lack of air conditioning made it quite uncomfortable, so I left after a pint.

I suspect that much of the crowd is made up of BIMM and NCAD students, and student crowds can be quite fickle in where they attend - S1449 The Jug across the road is currently closed but if it reopens it could whip the audience away - but it at least provides a base audience for them.

If there was some form of cooling, it'd probably be quite nice to stay here for a while - there is even food available in the form of toasties - but it's just too clammy to countenance currently.