In 1764, John Bush, an English traveller, visited Dublin and had the following to say about the city:
While the rebuilding by the Wide Streets Commission fundamentally changed the streetscape in Dublin, a property boom led to additional building outside the central core. Unlike twentieth century building booms in Dublin the eighteenth century developments were carefully controlled. The developing areas were divided into precincts, each of which was given to a different developer. The scope of their developments were restricted, however, with strict controls imposed on style of residential building, design of buildings and location, so producing a cohesive unity that came to be called Georgian Dublin.
. Many of the streets in the new areas were named after the property developers, often with developers commemorated both in their name and by their peerage should they have received one. Among the streets named after developers are Capel Street , Mountjoy Square and Aungier Street .
Dublin Castle 's Georgian Upper Castle Yard. The main body of the Castle was rebuilt along Georgian lines following a disastrous fire in the late seventeenth century
For the initial years of the Georgian era, the north side of the city was considered a far more respectable area to live. However, when the
Earl of Kildare chose to move to a new large ducal palace built for him on what up to that point was seen as the
inferior southside, he caused shock. When his Dublin townhouse, Kildare House (renamed
Leinster House when he was made
Duke of Leinster ) was finished, it was by far the biggest aristocratic residence other than Dublin Castle, and it was greeted with envy.
The Earl had predicted that his move would be followed, and it was. Three new residential squares appeared on the southside, Merrion Square (facing his residence's garden front), St Stephen's Green and the smallest and last of Dublin's five Georgian squares to be built, Fitzwilliam Square . Aristocrats , bishops and the wealthy sold their northside townhouses and migrated to the new southside developments, even though many of the developments, particularly in Fitzwilliam Square, were smaller and less impressive than the buildings in Henrietta Street . While the wealthier people lived in houses on the squares, those with lesser means and lesser titles lived in smaller, less grand but still impressive developments off the main squares, such as Upper and Lower Mount Street and Leeson Street .
Despite the rebuilding of Dublin during this time, sanitation continued to be an issue for the city. With the lack of sewers, the city continued to rely on cesspits. The period was also marked by overcrowding in cemeteries. In 1809, the Paving Board was established to erect lamps, clean and pave the streets, and install sewers.
The Act of Union and Georgian Dublin
St. Stephen's Green
, positioned between a Victorian building (right) and a now-demolished 1960s office block (left). Over half the Georgian buildings on St. Stephen's Green have been lost since the Georgian era. Many were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although the Irish Parliament was composed exclusively of representatives of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency , the established ruling minority Protestant community in Ireland, it did show significant sparks of independence, most notably the achievement of full legislative independence in 1782, where all the restrictions previously surrounding the powers of the new parliament in College Green, notably Poynings' Law were repealed. This period of legislative freedom however was short-lived.
In 1800, under pressure from the British Government of Mr. Pitt, in the wake of the rebellion of the last years of the century, which was aided and abetted by the French invasion in support of the rebels
St. Patrick's Day (17 March) every year, many found them less appealing than in the days when they could sit in parliament for a session in College Green. Many of the leading peers, including the
Duke of Leinster and
Viscount Powerscourt , almost immediately sold their palatial Dublin townhouses, Powerscourt House and Leinster House. Though many still flocked to Dublin every social season, many did not or went to London. The loss of their revenue and that of their extensive staff hurt the Dublin economy severely. While the 'new' Georgian centres southside continued to flourish, the northside Georgian squares soon fell into squalor, as new owners of the buildings crammed in massive numbers of poor into the former residences of earls and bishops, in some cases cramming an entire family into one old drawing room. Mountjoy Square in particular became run-down, until such was its state and degree of dereliction in the 1980s that it was used as a film set for stories set in post-
blitz London and post-
war Berlin . The empty shells of the graceful houses, reduced to unsanitary tenements before being demolished in the 1980s, were used as a backdrop for a
U2 rock video.
Georgian Dublin today
Typical Georgian doorways in Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square .
In the years after independence in 1922,
Countess of Fingall, in her regularly republished memoirs
Seventy Years Young , wrote in the 1920s of the disappearance of that world and of her change from a big townhouse in Dublin, full of servants to a small flat with one maid. By the 1920s and certainly by the 1930s, many of the previous homes in Merrion Square had become business addresses of companies, with only Fitzwilliam Square of all the five squares having any residents. (Curiously, in the 1990s, new wealthy businessmen such as Sir
Tony O'Reilly and
Dermot Desmond began returning to live in former offices they had bought and converted
back into homes.) By the 1930s, plans were discussed in
Éamon de Valera 's government to demolish all of Merrion Square, perhaps the most intact of the five squares, on the basis that the houses were "old fashioned" and "un-national". These plans were put on hold in 1939 due to the outbreak of
World War II and a lack of capital and investment and had been essentially forgotten about by 1945.
Many of the houses had been subdivided into tenement flats, and were often poorly maintained by the owners. In June 1963, two tenement houses collapsed within 10 days. The first happened in early on 2 June, when a house collapsed on Bolton Street, killing to elderly occupants. Then, on 12 June two young girls were killed when two 4-storey tenement houses on Fenian Street collapsed on to the street, crushing them. This led to local residents to call on the authorities to "clear the slums" and crack down on negligent landlords, but also is viewed as clearing the way for developers to demolish thee older buildings regardless of their condition. The tenements came to symbolise Dublin's urban poverty, with the focus being on clearing the inner-city slums and demolishing these Georgian structures under the building code as dangerous.
Neo-Georgian
pastiche houses erected in the 1980s and 1990s, where the previous Georgian buildings had been demolished decades earlier
Further destruction of Georgian buildings did occur despite these circumstances. Mountjoy Square , was under threat when a large amount of property on the south side was demolished by property speculators during the 1960s and 70s; even so, buildings with facsimile facades were subsequently built in place, re-completing the square's uniform external appearance. The world's longest row of Georgian houses, running from the corner of Merrion Square down to Leeson Street Bridge, was divided in the early 1960s to demolish part of the row and replace them with a modern styled office block.
Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square West
By the 1990s, attitudes had changed dramatically. Stricter new planning guidelines sought to protect the remaining Georgian buildings. During this period, a number of old houses in poor repair, which had been refused planning permission, caught fire and burnt to the ground, paved the way for redevelopment.[citation needed ] However, in contrast with the lax development controls applied in Ireland for many decades, by the 1990s a changed mindset among politicians, planners and the leaders of Dublin City Council (formerly Dublin Corporation ) desired to preserve as much as possible of the remaining Georgian buildings.
Perhaps the biggest irony for some is that residence that marked the move of the aristocrats from the northside to the southside (where the wealthier Dubliners have remained to this day), and that in some ways embodied Georgian Dublin,
Lord Edward Fitzgerald. The decision in the late 1950s to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Kildare Place and replace them with a brick wall was greeted with jubilation by a republican minister at the time,
Kevin Boland , who said they stood for everything he opposed. He described members of the fledgling
Irish Georgian Society , newly formed to seek to protect Georgian buildings, of being "belted earls".
Gallery
See also
References
Citations
^ "Home" . The Honorable Society of King's Inns . Retrieved 16 January 2022 .
Sources
Bush, John (1769). Hibernia Curiosa: A Letter from a Gentleman in Dublin to his Friend at Dover in Kent, Giving a general View of the Manners, Customs, Dispositions, &c. of the Inhabitants of Ireland. With occasional Observations on the State of Trade and Agriculture in that Kingdom. And including an Account of some of its most remark-able Natural Curiosities, such as Salmon-Leaps, Water-Falls, Cascades, Glynns, Lakes, &c With a more particular Description of the Giant's Cause-way in the North; and of the celebrated Lake of Killarney in the South of Ireland; taken from an attentive Survey and Examination of the Originals. Collected in a Tour Through the Kingdom in the Year 1764 And ornamented with Plans of the principal Originals, engraved from Drawings taken on the Spot . London: London (Printed for W. Flexney, opposite Gray's-Inn-Gate, Holbourn); Dublin (J. Potts and J. Williams).
McDonald, Frank (1985). The Destruction of Dublin . Gill and MacMillan. .
McDonald, Frank (1989). Saving the City: How to halt the destruction of Dublin . Tomar Publishing. .
Saving the City . Tomar Publishing Limited. 1989. .
Maxwell, Constantia (1997). Dublin Under the Georges . Lambay Books. .
Ó Gráda, Diarmuid, Georgian Dublin; The Forces That Shaped The City (Cork University Press, 2015, )
Further reading
External links