Wednesday, 30 December 2020

A Perfect Level of Detail - Goad Fire Maps

I'd always hoped that I'd stumble across a map of Dublin with every pub marked on it as such, preferably with its trading name and as many possible details as you can fit on a map. 

While the OSI 25":1 Mile series maps from the turn of the last century do, occasionally, mark pubs and provide a trading name in certain areas of Dublin - particularly outer suburbia such as this long gone pub in Whitehall...

Image sourced from geohive.ie. Original map is now Public Domain

...They do not provide much coverage in the city centre, which is where the majority of pubs that no longer exist are.

However, a post by BeerFoodTravel last month on the Dublin Hop Stout Brewery featured the Goad Fire Maps of Dublin, which appeared to show extremely high detail of what individual buildings in Dublin city centre were at the time of the maps printing (1893). High quality scans of these maps exist on the British Library website; covering Dublin, Cork and Limerick; covering core industrial and retail areas of each city.

These are the first maps I have found that explicitly mark pubs and hotels accurately as such; and unlike Thoms Directories of the time - and up to the 1950s - there is no use of euphemism - "Spirit Merchant" etc - and no recording of places with inappropriate licences for on-sales either. In some areas of the city, the volume of pubs recorded at the time reaches almost unimaginable levels; and often more than I had recorded

Goad Map extract of the corner of Commons Street and North Wall Quay in 1893 via British Library. Original map is now Public Domain

1893 is nine years prior to the start of my era of interest, but pubs are relatively static items. Scanning over the many maps available has given me a list of about 60 premises to investigate; in the form of premises marked as pubs or hotels which I did not previously have any entry for. 

I've worked to verify the first fifteen so far, and have added six pins to the map - and most of the remaining ones may yet be added after some further Thoms research when the DCLA reopens; although Dublin did feature many Temperance Hotels in that era. 

One premises has turned up as being a tied house of the Mountjoy Brewery, not something I was aware that they ever had; and further information to go against the idea that Dublin did not have tied houses, something I have written on in the past.

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