Temple Bar Webcam, Dublin, Ireland

For five days every March, St Patrick’s Festival takes over Dublin, and by the evening of the 17th the cobbled lane outside The Temple Bar pub is shoulder to shoulder. The Temple Bar webcam watches that lane, the street called Temple Bar in the cultural quarter of the same name, on the south bank of the River Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. The pub has two cameras, one inside and one on the street; this player carries the street view, with buskers, tour groups and the queue at the door passing in front of the pub at 47-48 Temple Bar. It is one of the Dublin webcams on the site.

Mornings on the Temple Bar live cam

The pub opens at 10:30 a.m. from Monday to Saturday and at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, so the early hours of the stream show the quarter at its quietest, with the cobbles mostly empty and the first visitors stopping to photograph the facade.

Weekends start earlier around the corner. Temple Bar Square holds a book market on Saturdays and Sundays, and Meeting House Square has hosted a Saturday food market since the summer of 2004, so foot traffic on the Temple Bar live stream builds from late morning. In summer the same square, named after a Quaker meeting house nearby, turns into an open-air cinema for evening film screenings.

Live music and late nights at The Temple Bar

Live music starts when the doors open and runs until 1:30 a.m. from Sunday to Wednesday and 2:30 a.m. from Thursday to Saturday, which is why the Temple Bar live cam rarely looks empty after dark. The bar claims the largest whiskey collection in Ireland, and since 2005 it has matured its own Temple Bar whiskey in the cellars.

In 2011 the guitarist David Browne played here for 114 hours, 6 minutes and 30 seconds, a Guinness World Record for the longest marathon guitar set. Inside, a life-size bronze statue of James Joyce stands at the bar, and a beer garden in the expanded premises at number 46 adds room on busy nights. For a neighbourhood pub well away from the tourist crowds, the Brian Boru pub cam watches Prospect Road in Glasnevin, near the cemetery and the Botanic Gardens.

St Patrick’s Day on the Temple Bar webcam

The biggest crowds of the year arrive in March. The St Patrick’s Festival programme runs the 2027 edition from Saturday 13 to Wednesday 17 March, and once the parade ends on the 17th, much of the crowd moves on to the pubs of Temple Bar.

April brings a quieter date. On 13 April 1742, Handel’s Messiah had its first performance on Fishamble Street, at the western edge of the quarter, and it is still performed there on the same date every year.

Why is it called Temple Bar?

The name first appears on Bernard de Gomme’s map of Dublin in 1673. It is usually traced to Sir William Temple, provost of Trinity College from 1609 to 1627, whose family had a house and gardens here, though the street may also borrow its name from Temple Bar in London. The pub building dates to about 1840 and is on Dublin City Council’s Record of Protected Structures; it took its current name when the Cleary family bought it in 1992.

That was a year after the government set up Temple Bar Properties, in 1991, to turn a run-down district of warehouses and cheap studios into a cultural quarter. Plans in the 1970s and 1980s to clear the area for a bus station had kept rents low, which is how artists and small businesses moved in first.

Parts of the ground are newer than they look. The riverside here was reclaimed land and only got its quay wall when Wellington Quay was built in 1812, while much earlier, from about 1259, an Augustinian friary stood near what is now Cecilia Street. By 2011 the quarter’s residential population had reached about 2,000.

Today the quarter runs from the Liffey to Dame Street and from Westmoreland Street to Fishamble Street, a grid of narrow 18th-century streets that holds the Irish Film Institute, the Project Arts Centre and the Ark, a cultural centre for children that opened in Meeting House Square on 1 July 1996. Its political history goes back further: the Society of United Irishmen was founded in a tavern on Eustace Street in 1791.

Before visiting in person, remember that the doors open two hours later on Sunday than on the rest of the week, and that St Patrick’s Day is the busiest date of the year on this street; a look at the Temple Bar webcam before you leave shows how long the queue is. For other cities to watch while Dublin sleeps, open our live webcams from around the world.