The widest street in Dublin.

Francis Aungier, third Baron Aungier of Longford and later first Earl, was Master of Ordnance at the Restoration and a close ally of the Duke of Ormonde. In 1661 he laid out a new street on twenty acres his grandfather had bought south of the medieval city, on ground that had belonged, until Henry VIII, to the Carmelite Priory of Saint Mary - the Whitefriars.

The street he drew was seventy feet wide, then the widest in Dublin. It was the first piece of the city planned on classical principles: even frontages, generous proportions, a thoroughfare intended to compete with the best of London and Paris.

By 1667 it had drawn tenants from the top of Irish society - the Bishop of Kilmore, the Earls of Donegal and Meath, the Countess of Mount Alexander. Aungier leased plots to tradesmen who built and sublet the houses: John Linegar, a slater, put up eight of them in the 1660s alone.

The estate's fashionable moment was brief. By the time Rocque surveyed the city in 1756, the great houses had been subdivided and the aristocracy had moved on to newer squares. But the street itself, and the depth of the plots behind it, is still the street Francis Aungier drew.