Street Wise - Custume Place

This series of articles for the Westmeath Independent was run in conjunction with the Street Wise Athlone series on Athlone Community Radio

Athlone Miscellany with Gearoid O'Brien

Custume Place is named for Sgt. Custume, a sergeant of Maxwell’s Dragoons, who volunteered to lead a small party of men out on to the Elizabethan Bridge of Athlone during the Siege of 1691, in order to dislodge planks which had been laid overnight by Williamite engineers. The object of the exercise was to prevent the Williamite advance on the Castle. Custume and his men died in their valiant attempt. Unfortunately, we know nothing more about the brave Sgt. Custume, we don’t even know what nationality he was, or, indeed, if his surname was actually recorded correctly. He was one of the great heroes of the day and his deeds have been celebrated in the famous Ballad of Athlone.

Today, Custume Place, is a short street which links Church Street to both the town bridge and to Bridge Street but it was once, before the present bridge was built in the 1840s, the principal market place of Athlone. The short stretch of Custume Place from Burgess to Thyme Restaurant led into Bridge Street and directly on to the Elizabethan bridge which stretched across the Shannon to Main Street.

Earlier Names

In the Fiants of Elizabeth in 1578 this area was simply described as ‘Market Place’. One of the most important public buildings in the town for several centuries was the Tholsel or Market House, which stood on the site of the Old I.R.A. Memorial in Custume Place. The earliest Market House dated from 1578, it was a wooden structure which only lasted about 20 years. King James ordered the erection of a new Tholsel in 1603 but presumably this was destroyed during the Siege of 1691.

A new, and more permanent, stone-structure with a clock-tower was built by the Corporation of Athlone in 1703 and survived as the Market House until c1841 when the site was cleared in preparation for the Shannon Navigation Works and the building of the present town bridge.

In 1824 in Pigot’s Directory of Ireland this street is referred to as Tholsel Place, sometimes written Tolsey Place, as on the first Ordnance Survey map of Athlone in 1837.

During the reign of Queen Victoria, the name was changed to Victoria Place, it was certainly known as Victoria Place in 1846 and possibly since the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1837. It continued to be called Victoria Place until Athlone Urban District Council changed its name to Custume Place in 1906.

AIB Bank

One of the landmark buildings in Custume Place is AIB Bank formerly the Provincial Bank. The Provincial Bank was the first branch of a large commercial bank to be opened in Athlone. It opened on an adjoining site in 1827, but this building designed by William G. Murray (1827-71) was completed in 1861. A novel feature of the design is the attractive footbridge which provides access from the town bridge. The laneway part of which runs beneath this footbridge is Hatter’s Lane which was once the centre of the famous Athlone Felt Hat industry. The building bears a striking resemblance to the Cootehill Branch of the same bank which was also designed by W.G. Murray.

From Post Office to The Central Hotel and The Five Star Supermarket

On Sunday 25th September 1977 along with many others I spent hours watching the demolition of a landmark building in Custume Place, the old Five Star Supermarket which had opened more than a decade earlier at a time when supermarkets were a novelty in Ireland.

This building had been the main Post Office for Athlone for forty years until it closed its doors on Friday 3rd September 1937 with the present Post Office in Barrack Street opening on the following Monday. The building also once housed ‘Ramsey’s Hotel’, a family-run Temperance hotel which closed in the Autumn of 1925 when Mrs Ramsey and her daughters, Nancy and May, moved to Sligo. In 1929 Michael O’Ferrall of Fry Place offered “The old established ‘Ramsey’s Hotel’ Northgate Street, for sale for Miss Hewson”. The entrance to the hotel was still on Northgate Street at this time. There is no further mention of the hotel until December 1937 when there was an application to convert the ‘Old Post Office’ for use as a hotel.

The Central Hotel, as it was known, was open for business in January 1938. The proprietors were the Misses Roden from Clones. The Central Hotel was very popular with commercial travellers and others. By this time, it was the only commercial hotel in Athlone which did not have a drinks licence, and the Misses Roden were happy to continue in that tradition. It was when it became The Central Hotel that the hotel entrance was moved from Northgate Street to Custume Place. By 1960 the hotel had been taken over by James G. and Marie Nash who continued to run the twenty-bedroom hotel until it closed in 1963. In July that year there was an auction of the furniture, fittings and effects of the hotel, and in August D.E. Williams received permission to carry out reconstruction of the building for use as a supermarket.

The Genoa Café

It is often, incorrectly assumed that the Genoa Café is in Church Street, in fact the first five premises from Parsons Corner towards Church Street are all in Custume Place. For over 80 years the Genoa Café has been a well-known establishment in the town. A short notice in this paper on 5th October 1940 heralded the arrival of Athlone’s most modern café. “The café is attractively planned and offers the utmost comfort to patrons. Messrs Malocca, proprietors, were awarded the diploma of merit for the quality of their ices at Olympia, London”. The café was established in the ground floor of the premises then owned by Mrs Emily Greene (nee Gill) who ran a hairdressing salon on the upper floor. However, when Mrs Greene offered the premises for sale in January 1952 it was acquired by Mr and Mrs Frank Malocca (otherwise Magliocca) who made it their family home. Very quickly the Genoa Café became noted both for the quality of its food and its moderate prices, an additional attraction was that they stayed open until midnight seven nights a week. The Magliocca family expanded its empire by acquiring adjoining premises in Custume Place and are still very popular in the business life of the town.

The Ritz Cinema

For almost sixty years the Ritz Cinema building, designed by Michael Scott’s firm of Architects dominated one corner of the bridge of Athlone. It was the first purpose-built cinema in the town and in its original state, with its glass façade, it was a fine example of the international style of architecture. However, it was brutalised by later renovation works and had lost much of its architectural appeal. It closed as a cinema in 1984 and was eventually demolished in November 1999.

Parsons’ Corner

To a generation of older Athlonians the iconic red-brick building on the corner of Custume Place and Northgate Street will always be known as Parsons’ Corner, despite the fact that Raphael Shoes and later Dillon’s shoe shop occupied the premises in more recent years. It was built by John Parsons who had started in business in Athlone in 1876. John Parsons was descended from a family in Tullamore, although his parents John and Ann Parsons lived in Moate and are buried in the local Church of Ireland churchyard.

Next article: Northgate Street

Previous articles in the series can be seen here