Irish Square, St Asaph

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Irish Square, St Asaph

This area of St Asaph is known as Irish Square. Today it’s occupied by the offices of chartered accountants Salisbury & Co and the car park of the Bryn Dinas pub.

The Square housed many Irish people in basic lodgings by 1850. On bonfire night (5 November) that year, police intervened to prevent a mob reaching the Square, where “a great number of Irish and Roman Catholics” lived. The Pope’s recent restoration of a Roman Catholic hierarchy within Britain had stoked resentment in many communities. In St Asaph, a crowd followed a boy carrying a “No Popery” banner to the common, where effigies of Guy Fawkes and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (newly-installed Catholic Archbishop of Westminster) were burned. A “disturbance” at the Square was mooted but the police managed to disperse the crowd.

Old photo showing the erection of a telephone poleMany Irish navvies (from “navigator”) were involved in building the Vale of Clwyd Railway, including St Asaph station, in the 1850s. Some took up this hard, dangerous work and its nomadic lifestyle after fleeing Ireland’s 1845 potato famine but many Irishmen had been employed in Great Britain in large numbers on earlier construction projects, including digging canals (before the railway age).

The photo of Irish Square in 1906 shows a single-storey white building. This was the common lodging house, run by a giant of a man called Jack Boyce. It was nicknamed the “Hotel de Fourpence”, since a room cost 4d a night. The price included a portion of soup from the dolly tub, a large vessel intended for washing clothes, but no bed. Lodgers had to sleep on the floor.

According to police records from 1880, there were three brothels in Irish Square – despite the proximity of the cathedral and, in Chester Street, the police station, law court and Catholic church.

The photo is captioned “The telephone pole” and probably records the arrival of St Asaph’s first telephone pole. Butcher WM Williams is thought to have been the first person in the city to own a phone.

Irish Square was cleared soon afterwards and new offices built for St Asaph City Council. The municipal building was extended at the rear in the 1990s and is now occupied by Salisbury & Co.

Postcode: LL17 0RN    View Location Map