The street and what it’s for
Dawson Street (Irish: Sráid Dásain) runs the 400 metres from St Stephen’s Green to the back wall of Trinity College, parallel to Grafton Street and a tram-track’s width quieter. It’s the address-rather-than-stroll sort of street: traffic runs one way northbound and a Luas glides down the middle, so the pleasure here isn’t wandering a pedestrian boulevard but knowing which doors to open. One reviewer put it well – Grafton Street takes the footfall, Dawson has the substance.
It’s named after Joshua Dawson, the civil servant who bought this marshy ground in 1705 and laid the street out two years later. By 1728 it was finished and reckoned one of the best roads in the city.
The Mansion House
The one unmissable thing here is the Mansion House, and it’s worth knowing why before you walk past it. Dawson built it as his own townhouse in 1710 and sold it to Dublin Corporation in 1715 as the Lord Mayor’s residence – which it still is. That makes it the oldest freestanding house in Dublin and the only surviving mayoral residence in Ireland, older than London’s by fifteen years. Its domed Round Room was thrown up in 1821 for a visit by George IV, and on 21 January 1919 it held the first sitting of Dáil Éireann.
The catch: it’s a working civic building, not a museum, so the interior is usually closed to the public. Time a visit for Culture Night or Open House if you want to see inside; otherwise it’s the stuccoed façade and the cast-iron porch from the street.
Almost opposite, St Ann’s Church was built in 1720, its current neo-Romanesque front added in 1868 by Thomas Newenham Deane. Step in if it’s open for the small tradition that has outlasted everything around it: a shelf by the altar where loaves of bread are left out for anyone who needs them, funded by a parishioner’s bequest three centuries ago.
Books, a tiny pub, and a theatre behind a café
Hodges Figgis is the bookshop, and it’s a serious one: founded in 1768, among the oldest in the world, and trading from Dawson Street since 1945. Joyce name-checked it in Ulysses, and the green-fronted, multi-floor shop earns the reputation – give the basement a look for discounted stock.
Near the Green end, find The Dawson Lounge, by general agreement Dublin’s smallest pub: a few steps down to a room that barely holds a few dozen people. And tucked at the back of the Bestseller Café at number 41 is the Glass Mask Theatre, a cabaret-style room where the audience sits at small tables – named Theatre Company of the Year in 2021, and one of the more genuinely surprising nights out in the city centre.
Eating and drinking
For a special meal, the standout is The Greenhouse, which holds a Michelin star – the serious-dining option on a street otherwise heavy on steakhouses. For a drink, Café en Seine is the landmark, a big Parisian-style room at numbers 39–40 that runs from daytime café to late-night bar; the building was once the townhouse of William Parsons, Earl of Rosse, the astronomer who built the largest telescope in the world in the 1840s. Nearby, 37 Dawson Street keeps a whiskey bar stocked with Irish labels and mixes cocktails to order rather than from a list.
Getting there
The Luas Green Line stops on Dawson Street – the Cross City extension opened in December 2017, running from Broombridge to St Stephen’s Green – and Dublin Bus serves the street well, with Pearse and Tara Street rail stations a short walk east. Driving in is the weak point: on-street parking is scarce and tightly enforced, so use a car park such as Q-Park Dawson Street (around €3 an hour) or the 24-hour Q-Park Setanta around the corner.
If you’ve only an hour, stand outside the Mansion House and read its history off the plaque, then walk up to Hodges Figgis and lose half of it among the shelves. That’s Dawson Street doing what it does best.