Dublin By Pub
Dublin By Pub is an amateur social history project overseen by ordinary Dubliners, the overall aim of which is to create a snapshot in time of each and every Dublin city pub, as it stands, in modern day Dublin… Or at least that’s the version we’d give to the bank manager, or an interviewer, or the Gardaí. This website is home to the results from our quest to booze in every pub in town. Here you can find an ever growing list of articles we’ve put together offering anecdotes and experiences encountered across the wide landscape of pubs on offer in Dublin City.
How We Started Out
Once upon a hungover Sunday two friends and I found ourselves in search of the cure. Being tired of our usual haunt we wandered into the suburbs and ultimately found ourselves in The Beaumont House.
As the desired effect of the hair of the dog began to take root, our normal recourse of conversation resumed. This conversation soon turned to comment on our surroundings and in the midst of arguing the pros and cons of carvery bars in pubs (me being vehemently against) the nature of the chat turned to more of an exploratory nature as we began to question each other on pubs each of us had visited individually.
This in turn led us in an effort to try to quantify the amount of the city’s pubs we had drank in between ourselves, and in realising that we had amassed a decent amount between the three of us, we vowed to make a go of it. To drink in every pub in Dublin.
How We Actually Started Out
All of the above is very good and well, but this idea of actually getting to all the pubs in the city didn’t really take any structure amongst ourselves for a good while after its inception. For years the idea of “the list” as we called it was no more than a topic of conversation between friends.
Eventually, we managed to get the finger out and put in a bit more of a driven effort. It was in the later half of 2016 that we decided that we needed to keep a record of our efforts, we agreed that an image of the exterior of each pub accompanied by a few words on our experience there would suffice as a record. Instagram became a natural home for these records and the page grew from there.
The Pubs
Currently our boundaries are set on the north and the south by the canals – The Royal and The Grand. Our western boundaries have been loosely set around The Phoenix Park, Kilmainham and the circular roads – The North and The South. We have a loose, ever-evolving, hypocritical set of guidelines (which we will get around to posting) on what we do and what we don’t consider to be a pub, but that said we don’t discriminate. There’s no pub too rough or too affluent, we’re looking to tick them all. Check out the image below for our current defining boundaries of Dublin City, we’re currently in talks to expand east to include all of East Wall and Ringsend.
