Hidden Dublin

Townsend Street, The Lock Hospital and the German Lutheran Church

Next time you’re passing a street sign for Townsend Street, look closely at the Irish version of the name. Instead of something like “Sraid Deireadh an Bhaile” you’ll see “Sraid Chnoc na Lobhar” which translates as “Leper Hill Street”. 

Leprosy was common in Ireland from the 5^th to the 14^th centuries, and it was from Townsend Street that victims would assemble before embarking on the pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela in Spain in the hope of a cure. To the Medieval faithful it was similar in status to Medjugorje or Lourdes today.

Townsend Street, in more recent times, was important in the treatment of a very different illness. The plot of land where the Countess Markievicz  Leisure Centre stands today was the once the site of the “Lock Hospital” or Westmoreland Hospital. It was built in 1753  as the “Hospital for Incurables” and remained so until 1792 when it started to be used for the “reception of persons in indigent circumstances afflicted with the venereal complaint” 

The Lock Hospital, Townsend Street (Photo: Seamus de Burca from "Lost Dublin" by Frederick O'Dwyer 

A peek at a single page of the 1911 census (online and free to view thanks to the National Archives) for the Lock Hospital makes interesting reading:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai000222314/

The Lock Hospital was demolished in the 1950s. The door pillars were salvaged after its demolition and stand in the gardens of John Hunt (of the Hunt Museum fame) on the hill of Howth.

This is how the Lock Hospital looked on a map of Dublin in 1847:

Note the tiny “German Lutheran Church” behind it. The church was somewhat notorious. 

A certain Rev, J.G.F. Schulze, for a fee, would perform secret marriages for people keen to circumvent stigma surrounding mixed marriages, or those who didn’t want the expense of a public marriage. He was one of several clergymen in Dublin performing this service. He performed over 6,000 clandestine marriages between 1806 and 1837.  

The church was last used for worship in 1840. The Irish Times reported that it was bought afterwards by a blacksmith who removed the tombstones in the church’s burial grounds and sold them to the Dublin Corporation who used them as window-sills when building houses in the Coombe area of Dublin. The church remained standing until the 1940s by which time it had suffered the indignity of having been a warehouse, a club, a granary and a motor engineering works. Its site is now part of an office block car park.

The Lutheran Church Townsend St ca. 1820 (Drawing from the National Library by an unknown artist.)

An interesting postscript to this is that when researching the Lutheran Church part of this article I was told by a member of the current Lutheran clergy that an archaeological excavation of the site in the 1990s (unsurprisingly) turned up human remains. The Church was told that these bones would have been a lot older than the church and "probably dating back to a hospital from the 13^th century." 

The remains were newsworthy at the time due to the fact that they showed evidence of dental damage caused by pipe smoking. As tobacco was only introduced into Europe in the 1500s, this reassurance given to the Lutheran Church by the Archaeological company seems very suspect indeed.