to describe a historic period in the development of the city of Dublin, Ireland, from 1714 (the beginning of the reign of King George I of Great Britain and of Ireland) to the death in 1830 of King George IV. During this period, the reign of the four Georges, hence the word Georgian, covers a particular and unified style, derived from Palladian Architecture, which was used in erecting public and private buildings
to describe the modern day surviving buildings in Dublin erected in that period and which share that architectural style
Henrietta Street. The street contains some of the oldest and largest Georgian houses in Dublin. It was converted into tenements in the latter part of the 19th century.
Though, strictly speaking, Georgian architecture could only exist during the reigns of the four Georges, it had its antecedents prior to 1714 and its style of building continued to be erected after 1830, until replaced by later styles named after the then monarch, Queen Victoria, i.e. Victorian.
Dublin's development
Dublin was for much of its existence a medieval city, marked by the existence of a particular style of buildings, built on narrow winding medieval streets. The first major changes to this pattern occurred during the reign of King Charles II when the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Ormonde (later made Duke of Ormonde) issued an instruction which was to have dramatic repercussions for the city as it exists today. Though the city over the century had grown around the River Liffey, as in many other medieval cities, buildings backed onto the river. This allowed the dumping of household waste directly into the river, creating a form of collective sewer. As Dublin's quays underwent development, Ormonde insisted that the frontages of the houses, not their rears, should face the quay sides, with a street to run along each quay. By this single regulation Ormonde changed the face of the city. No longer would the river be a sewer hidden between buildings. Instead it became a central feature of the city, with its quays lined by large three and four-storey houses and classic public buildings, such as the Four Courts, the Custom House (1707) and, later and grander, Custom House designed, as was the Four Courts, by master architect James Gandon. For his initiative, Ormonde's name is now given to one of the city quays.
It was, however, only one of a number of crucial developments. As the city grew in size, stature, population and wealth, two changes were needed. (1) The existing narrow street medieval city required major redevelopment, and (2) major new development of residential areas was required.
Rebuilding Dublin's core
An example of Georgian opulence. A ceiling from the Dublin townhouse of Viscount Powerscourt, showing the splendour of Georgian decoration. His former townhouse was sensitively turned into a shopping centre in the 1980s.
A new body called the Wide Streets Commission was created to remodel the old medieval city. It created a network of main thoroughfares by wholesale demolition or widening of old streets or the creation of entirely new ones. On the north side of the city, a series of narrow streets were merged and widened enormously to create a new street, called Sackville Street (now called O'Connell Street). At its lower end, a new bridge (now called O'Connell Bridge) was erected, beyond which two new streets in the form of a 'V' appeared, known as Westmoreland Street and D'Olier Street. Westmoreland Street in turn led to a renamed Hoggen Green, which became College Green because it faced unto Trinity College Dublin. The new Irish Houses of Parliament, designed by Edward Lovett Pearce, also faced onto College Green, while from College Green a new widened Dame Street led directly down to the medieval Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, past Dublin Castle and the Royal Exchange, the latter a new building. The Castle began the process of rebuilding, turning it from a medieval castle to a Georgian palace.
Contemporary impressions
In 1764, John Bush, an English traveller, visited Dublin and had the following to say about the city:
"Dublin is a large, populous, and, for the greater part of it, well built city; not much ornamented, indeed, with grand or magnificent buildings, a few, however, there are, of which the college or university, the only one they have in the kingdom - the parliament houses - the king's and the lying-in hospital, and Swift's for lunatics - with the marquis of Kildare's house are the principal. Their churches in general make but a very indifferent figure as to their architecture; and, what I was very much surprised at, are amazingly destitute of monumental ornament. The two houses of parliament are infinitely superior, in point of grandeur and magnificence, to those of Westminster. The house of lords is, perhaps, as elegant a room as any in Great-Britain or Ireland [..] The whole extent of the city of Dublin may be about one-third of London, including Westminster and Southwark, and one-fourth, at least, of the whole, from the accounts we received, has been built within these 40 years. Those parts of the town which have been added since that time are well built, and the streets in general well laid out, especially on the north side of the river; where the most considerable additions have been made within the term above mentioned."[1]
18th-century property developers
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.
Initially developments were focused on the city's north side. Among the earliest developments was Henrietta Street, a wide street lined on both sides by massive Georgian houses built on a palatial scale. At the top end of the street, a new James Gandon building, the King's Inns, was erected between 1795 and 1816. In this building, barristers were (and continue to be) trained and earned their academic qualifications.[2] Such was the prestige of the street that many of the most senior figures in Irish 'establishment' society, peers of the realm, judges, barristers, bishops bought houses here. Under the anti-CatholicPenal Laws, Roman Catholics, though the overwhelming majority in Ireland, were harshly discriminated against, barred from holding property rights or from voting in parliamentary elections until 1793. Thus the houses of Georgian Dublin, particularly in the early phase before Catholic Emancipation was granted in 1829, were almost invariably owned by a small Church of IrelandAnglican elite, with Catholics only gaining admittance to the houses as skivvies and servants. Ultimately the north side was laid out centred on two major squares, Rutland Square (now called Parnell Square for Charles Stewart Parnell), at the top end of Sackville Street, and Mountjoy Square. Such was the prestige of the latter square that among its many prominent residents was the Church of IrelandArchbishop of 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.[3] In 1809, the Paving Board was established to erect lamps, clean and pave the streets, and install sewers.[4]
The Act of Union and Georgian Dublin
A Georgian house on 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 Dublin Castle administration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland both the House of Commons and the House of Lords passed the Irish Act of Union, uniting both the Kingdom of Ireland and its parliament with the Kingdom of Great Britain and its parliament in London. As a result, from 1 January 1801 Dublin found itself without a parliament with which to draw hundreds of peers and bishops, along with their thousands of servants. While many did come to Dublin still for the Social Season, where the Lord Lieutenant hosted debutantes balls, state balls and drawing rooms in a period from January until 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-warBerlin. 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.
In the years after independence in 1922, independent Ireland had little sympathy for Georgian Dublin, viewing it as a symbol of British rule and of the unionist identity that was alien to Irish identity. By this time, many of the gentry who had lived in them had moved elsewhere; some to the wealthy Victorian suburbs of Rathmines and Rathgar, Killiney and Ballsbridge, where Victorian residences were built on larger plots of land, allowing for gardens, rather than the lack of space of the Georgian eras. Those that had not moved in many cases had by the early twentieth century sold their mansions in Dublin. The abolition of the Dublin Castle administration and the Lord Lieutenant in 1922 saw an end to Dublin's traditional "Social Season" of masked balls, drawing rooms and court functions in the Castle. Many of the aristocratic families lost their heirs in the First World War, their homes in the country to IRA burnings (during the Irish War of Independence) and their townhouses to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Daisy, the 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 two 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 the older buildings regardless of their condition.[5] 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.[6]
Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, Ireland. 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.
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, Leinster House, home of the Duke of Leinster, ended up as the parliament of independent republican Ireland; but his family also produced the republican leader 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".[7]
Leinster House is the seat of the Oireachtas, the parliament of Ireland. Originally, it was the ducal palace of the Dukes of Leinster.
The Irish Social Season was a period of aristocratic entertainment and social functions that stretched from January to St. Patrick's Day of a given year. During this period, the major and minor nobility left their country residences and lived in Georgian mansions in places like Rutland Square, Mountjoy Square, Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. Those with less financial means lived in smaller properties in streets nearby.
Merrion Square is a Georgian garden square on the southside of Dublin city centre.
The city of Dublin can trace its origin back more than 1,000 years, and for much of this time it has been Ireland's principal city and the cultural, educational and industrial centre of the island.
As with other cities in Ireland, Limerick has a history of great architecture. A 1574 document, prepared for the Spanish ambassador, describes some of the wealth and architecture in the city:
The architecture of Ireland is one of the most visible features in the Irish countryside – with remains from all eras since the Stone Age abounding. Ireland is famous for its ruined and intact Norman and Anglo-Irish castles, small whitewashed thatched cottages and Georgian urban buildings. What are unaccountably somewhat less famous are the still complete Palladian and Rococo country houses which can be favourably compared to anything similar in northern Europe, and the country's many Gothic and neo-Gothic cathedrals and buildings.
Dublin is one of the oldest capital cities in Europe – dating back over a thousand years. Over the centuries and particularly in the 18th century or Georgian era, it acquired a distinctive style of architecture. Since the 1960s, Dublin has been extensively re-developed, sometimes resulting in the replacement of earlier buildings. Some of this has been controversial with preservationists regarding the development as unwelcome.
Dublin 2, also rendered as D2 and D02, is a historic postal district on the southside of Dublin, Ireland. In the 1960s, this central district became a focus for office development. More recently, it became a focus for urban residential development. The district saw some of the heaviest fighting during Ireland's Easter Rising.
Merrion Street is a major Georgian street on the southside of Dublin, Ireland, which runs along one side of Merrion Square. It is divided into Merrion Street Lower, Merrion Square West and Merrion Street Upper. It holds one entrance to the seat of the Irish Parliament, the Oireachtas, major government offices and two major cultural institutions.
Mountjoy Square is a garden square in Dublin, Ireland, on the Northside of the city just under a kilometre from the River Liffey. One of five Georgian squares in Dublin, it was planned and developed in the late 18th century by Luke Gardiner, 1st Viscount Mountjoy. It is surrounded on all sides by terraced, red-brick Georgian houses. Construction of the houses began piecemeal in 1792 and the final property was completed in 1818.
Gardiner Street is a long Georgian street in Dublin, Ireland. It stretches from the River Liffey at its southern end via Mountjoy Square to Dorset Street at its northern end. The Custom House terminates the vista at the southern end, and the street is divided into Gardiner Street Upper, Gardiner Street Middle and Gardiner Street Lower.
Sam Stephenson was an Irish architect who studied at the Bolton Street School of Architecture, which is now known as Technological University Dublin. Many of his buildings generated considerable controversy when they were built.
Fitzwilliam Square is a Georgian garden square in the south of central Dublin, Ireland. It was the last of the five Georgian squares in Dublin to be built, and is the smallest.
Michael Stapleton is regarded as having been the most skilled stuccodore working in the neoclassical or "Adam" style that dominated Dublin interior decoration in the final decades of the 18th century.
Newtown Pery is an area of central Limerick, Ireland, and forms the main city centre of the city. The district is known for its Georgian architectural heritage and is the core area of Limerick's Georgian Quarter. It is one of the three towns that make up modern-day Limerick City Centre, the other two being the older Englishtown and Irishtown, which date from the medieval period. Newtown Pery houses the largest collection of Georgian townhouses in Ireland outside of Dublin. In 1837, Samuel Lewis in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland described Newtown Pery as "one of the handsomest towns in Ireland".
In British usage, the term townhouse originally referred to the opulent town or city residence of a member of the nobility or gentry, as opposed to their country seat, generally known as a country house or, colloquially, for the larger ones, stately home. The grandest of the London townhouses were stand-alone buildings, but many were terraced buildings.
Hawkins Street is a street in central Dublin, Ireland. It runs south from Rosie Hackett Bridge, at its junction with Burgh Quay, for 160 metres (170 yd) to a crossroads with Townsend Street, where it continues as College Street.
Fenian Street is a street in Dublin, Ireland.
Clare Street is a street in central Dublin, Ireland.
The Royal Hibernian Marine School, also known for a period as Mountjoy & Marine School, was a charity school in Dublin, Ireland established in 1766 to care for and educate the orphaned children of seamen. The school's building on Sir John Rogerson's Quay was in use as a school from 1773 until 1904 and continued to be used as offices and storage until the 1970s before being demolished in 1979.
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. ISBN0-7171-1386-8.
McDonald, Frank (1989). Saving the City: How to halt the destruction of Dublin. Tomar Publishing. ISBN1-871793-03-3.
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