Notably, in 1597, an older custom house at Wood Quay within the city walls at Winetavern Street[6] was destroyed in the Dublin gunpowder explosion.

[7] A later building was developed by James VI and I eastward of the city walls near Essex Gate on reclaimed land around 1620 bordering Crampton Court and creating Crane Lane as a means of access to Dame Street.

[20] The importance of the site in the mid-eighteenth century is evidenced in John Rocque's 1756 map, An Exact Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin in which numerous vessels can be seen lining Custom House Quay, and the entirety of the river eastwards.

Shops, taverns, coffee houses, printers, publishers, theatres and brothels proliferated in the area with the increase of trade and mercantile activity.

[24] By the 1770s, the suitability of the site was under serious reconsideration, with merchants complaining about the amount of shipping traffic on the river, the shallowness of the water, the inability of larger vessels to reach the Custom House,[10] and even the size of the building itself, which was too small.

[27] Remedial works continued to be carried out to maintain the operability of the site as a quay, and in the year 1774 alone, 308 tons of stones from the shoals were dredged from the river in front of the Custom House in an attempt to deepen the channel.

[27] John Beresford, who later became the first Commissioner of Revenue for Ireland in 1780, was pivotal in the decision to construct a newly sited Custom House downriver nearer to Dublin Bay.

[30] The plans for the new Custom House were unpopular with Dublin Corporation and the city guilds, however, who complained that it would still leave little room for shipping and was being built on what at the time was made up of low-lying sandbanks and marshland.

[30] Regardless of this, Beresford was still strongly in favour of building the new Custom House downstream and proposed that Sir William Chambers, the "celebrated English architect", would be asked to design it.

[24] These changes had been made on account of the merchants' objections to having to move their warehouses and business premises, which at that point were still located in the Essex Bridge area and would not be convenient should a new custom house be built lower down the river.

[29] The importance of the position may have factored into Robert Emmet's plan to blow it up or seize it as part of the attempted Irish rebellion of 1803 which took place on 23 July 1803.

[35] In July 1886, while excavations were being made for the foundation of the premises of Messrs. Dollard and Company (the site of the modern-day Clarence Hotel), the first course of the Custom House (possibly the arcade) was revealed, exposing "handsome" chiselled black limestone at a depth of 4 feet 6 inches from the then-level of Essex Street.