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THE DOCKLANDS -MAQUAY BRIDGE (Grand Canal)
'Dublin Docklands - An Urban Voyage’ is a work in progress, commissioned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, and due to be completed in the autumn of 2008. The following tale represents research I have undertaken for the project which may or may not be used in the final book.
MAQUAY BRIDGE (Grand Canal)
Connection: Grand Canal Street
This is the first of the Grand Canal bridges, running along the southernmost end of the Grand Canal Basin between Treasury Holdings (formerly Boland’s Bakery) and the Grand Canal Hotel. In the time of Bacon’s map, there was an engine and carriage factory just down the street where the Emerald Cottages stand today. When the bridge was rebuilt and the road widened the balance beams of the lower gates were removed and winches substituted.
The bridge was named after the banker George Maquay (1758 - 1820), a director of the Grand Canal Company in the 1790's. Maquay (sometimes Macquay) was one of the members of the Ballast Board who orchestrated the sale of Pigeon House Harbour to the Admiralty. In 1819, he and Leland Crosthwaite commissioned surveyor Francis Giles to assist their engineer George Halpin in building the North Bull Wall. Maquay's son John Leland Maquay junior (1791-1868) was a founder of the Pakenham & Maquay bank of Florence.
‘On Wednesday evening, a man was perceived taking a parcel out of the Grand Canal, near Maquay Bridge, by two gentlemen of the attornies infantry, who seized him, and upon examining the parcel, found it to contain eight well executed steel pikes, carefully made up in hay’ – The Cumberland Pacquet, Tuesday, 14th August 1798
