Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 17:32:00

A venue within a venue, with its own front door. The Ballroom is the ground-floor room of The Grand Social at 35 Liffey Street Lower, the bar and music complex that opened in the autumn of 2010 beside the Ha'penny Bridge and quickly became a north-quays landmark. The parent venue built its name fast - nominated for IMRO Music Venue of the Year annually and named Dublin Music Venue of the Year in 2012, with a tech team nominated against rooms the size of Vicar Street and Electric Picnic - and the guest list over the years runs from Primal Scream and Jake Bugg to Loyle Carner, Kae Tempest and Michael Kiwanuka. For most of its first decade and a half the Ballroom worked as the pre-gig room and weekend party floor, hosting Drink and Draw nights, DJ sets and private functions while the Loft upstairs took the headline bookings. A renovation and relaunch in July 2025 recast the room as a standalone live music and club space for up to 200 people, complete with its own entrance, bar and production setup - the feeling, as the venue puts it, of a hidden venue within a venue. The wider building gives the room its ecosystem: the 300-capacity Loft upstairs, a rooftop beer garden with retractable roof and cocktail bar, and the smaller Parlour, adding up to roughly 650 capacity across the complex. The programming mix follows the building's habit of ignoring genre borders - indie and electronic club nights, alternative markets, trad sessions and album launches share the calendar with weekend party DJs. For a room of its size the Ballroom carries unusual pedigree, borrowing fifteen years of booking relationships and sound-engineering reputation from the venue upstairs and pointing them at a 200-cap dancefloor beside the Liffey. The location does its own quiet work too: steps from the Ha'penny Bridge and the Luas, the Ballroom catches the city-centre crowd that bigger rooms across the river cannot, and its separate entrance means a club night can run flat out downstairs while a gig upstairs finishes in peace - two audiences, one address, no compromise.