Shop Street

A street of shops, and of pubs

The name is not unique to Galway; there is a Shop Street in Boyle, in Tuam and in Westport too. Galway's has been closed to traffic since the late 1990s, which is what makes the street performers possible: on a summer evening there can be a band at one end, a singer in the middle and a juggler at the bottom, and the crowd flows between them. The bookshops are here as well, Dubray Books and Eason on the street itself, with Charlie Byrne's around the corner on Middle Street.

In late 2017 the city proposed further improvements and more pedestrianisation for Shop Street and the streets around it, part of a long argument about how much of the centre should belong to people on foot.

Lynch's Castle

Halfway down the street stands one of the best-preserved historic buildings in central Galway: Lynch's Castle, a fortified townhouse of the Lynch family, one of the Tribes. It is thought to have been built in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and the arms of Henry VII are still on its front. It was five storeys high once; the floor levels were altered in 1820 and Georgian windows put in. In 1918 Nellie Burke rented it to the Munster and Leinster Bank and sold it to them two years later, and when Allied Irish Banks absorbed that bank in 1966 the castle became a branch of AIB, which it still is. Blake's Castle is the only other fortified townhouse of the Tribes to survive in the city.

Walking the street

Start at the top, where William Street comes down from Eyre Square, and the street carries you past the castle and the bookshops to the junction with Mainguard Street and High Street, and on down Quay Street to the Spanish Arch. It is about a ten-minute walk if you do not stop, which nobody manages. The model on this page pins the castle, the bookshops and the pubs; each has its own page with hours where they are recorded.