Dublin

City site

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Dublin’s geographic site is superb. Situated at the head of a beautiful bay, the city straddles the River Liffey where it breaks eastward through a hill-ringed plain to the shores of the Irish Sea. (The dark bog water draining into the river made the “black pool” that gave the city its name.) Almost certainly, this opening from the sea—leading through the mountains to the fruitful central plains of Ireland—originally attracted Viking raiders and Norse settlement. Each year the suburbs jut farther into the countryside, but to the south there is a natural limit posed by the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, which ring the city and provide some of its most beautiful vistas.

Climate

Dublin enjoys a maritime temperate climate. The average temperature is lowest in January–February, 42 °F (6 °C), and highest in July–August, peaking at about 68 °F (20 °C). Most sunshine is in May and June and averages four hours a day. The mean annual rainfall is 30–40 inches (760–1,000 mm), although more falls in the surrounding mountains. There are fewer than 10 days of snow per year.

City layout

Apart from the port area and the docks, Dublin is a low-built, steepled city, with few buildings dating from before the 17th century. The Roman Catholic churches are 19th- and 20th-century structures. The 17-story Liberty Hall (built 1961–65 as a trade-union headquarters), long Dublin’s tallest building, has been joined by a spate of new high-rise offices and apartments. Still, most of the buildings are no higher than 5 or 6 stories.

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The three elements that constitute the architectural legacy of Dublin—Norse, Norman, and Georgian—all meet in Dublin Castle. In the first two decades of the 13th century, the Normans obliterated the Norse stronghold and raised a château-fort. When the Georgians built the present red-brick castle, they left two towers of the old structure standing. The castle—the seat of British authority in Ireland until 1922—is now used for ceremonial occasions, especially the inauguration of the republic’s presidents, who reside at Áras an Uachtaráin (“the President’s House,” formerly the Viceregal Lodge) in Phoenix Park, and for local and international conferences. The castle also is the home of a number of cultural organizations, notably the Chester Beatty Library.

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Close to the castle a Norse king of Dublin built Christ Church Cathedral (c. 1030), which was replaced about 140 years later by a more magnificent Norman structure. By the 19th century the edifice was in ramshackle condition; it was restored in the 1870s at enormous cost. Its neighbour, St. Patrick’s, erected just outside the city walls, was also originally a Norse church that may have been built on an earlier Celtic foundation. Rebuilt by the Normans in 1191, it was enlarged and partially rebuilt over the centuries. It was in a state of collapse when Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the brewing magnate and a lord mayor of Dublin, financed its restoration in the mid-19th century. Christ Church is the cathedral for the diocese of Dublin and Glendalough, whereas St. Patrick’s, unusually, is not the seat of a bishop. Both have been Church of Ireland (Anglican) churches since the Reformation. In 1949 the funeral of Douglas Hyde, the first president of the Republic of Ireland, was held at St. Patrick’s. Because of the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition of its members’ attending Protestant services, the whole Irish government, apart from its two Anglican members, attended in the foyer of the cathedral. The Pro (for Provisional) Cathedral on Marlborough Street, to the east of O’Connell Street on the north side, is the principal Roman Catholic church. It was completed in 1825 and is the seat of the archbishop of Dublin and primate of Ireland.

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The area between St. Patrick’s and the Guinness Brewery on the Liffey is known as the Liberties, located outside the old city walls and so named because it was subject to private jurisdiction and not to the king or the town. In the years after World War II, large tracts of this district were cleared for low-cost housing.

Dublin’s early private speculators had a sense of order and beauty as acute as their sense of profit. The city’s streets were broad and its garden squares spacious. For their time (the 18th century), the houses were ultramodern—elegant yet simple Georgian and Neoclassical structures designed in the manner of the great English architects Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. The sweeps of red-brick houses, ranged in squares and long terraces and built with well-proportioned windows, made a harmonious whole that still stands as a happy achievement of urban architecture.

In the southern half of the town, between Trinity College and St. Stephen’s Green, Joshua Dawson, one of Dublin’s leading citizens, built an impressive house that was completed in 1710. The city soon bought the house to serve as residence of the lord mayor, and, as the Mansion House, it still does. The first Irish republican parliament, the Dáil Éireann, met there in 1919.

Dawson’s neighbours, the equally prominent Molesworths, followed his example and began building houses and entire streets. In 1745–48 the earl of Kildare erected a palace at the end of Molesworth Street; Kildare House, renamed Leinster House when the earl became the duke of Leinster, is thought to have been the model for the White House in Washington, D.C. It is now the seat of the republic’s parliament (Oireachtas). Twin Victorian buildings, which were constructed on either side of Leinster House in the 1880s, contain the National Library and the National Museum of Ireland. Merrion, immediately to the east, and Fitzwilliam, to the south, are two of the great 18th-century squares.

The oldest and largest of the city’s squares is St. Stephen’s Green, recorded in 1224 as common grazing land but enclosed and bordered with houses in the 1660s. Most of the imposing mansions now surrounding it were built in the 18th century. By 1887 the parkland was run down, and the Guinness family, whose former residence on the south side now houses the Department of Foreign Affairs, paid for its rehabilitation.

The city’s north-south axis runs from the western side of St. Stephen’s Green down Grafton Street and through College Green to the Liffey, across O’Connell Bridge to the river’s northern bank, and then along O’Connell Street to Parnell Square. Grafton Street, long Dublin’s premier shopping district, was made pedestrian-only in the 1990s, and it has become a lively thoroughfare hosting street entertainers. It emerges onto College Green between the University of Dublin (Trinity College) and the 1729 Parliament House, which is now the privately run Bank of Ireland’s headquarters.

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Along the Liffey’s northern quays stand James Gandon’s Neoclassical masterpieces of the Custom House (1781–91) and the Four Courts (1786–1802). The Custom House was burned out in 1921 by republicans who wished to destroy administrative records; the Four Courts was ruined by shellfire and mines at the outbreak of civil war in June 1922. Both have since been rebuilt.

O’Connell Street—first called Drogheda and then Sackville Street—is a stretch of shops, cinemas, and snack bars. The only building of any distinction to survive the warfare that swept the street in 1916 and again in 1922 was the General Post Office, seized as headquarters of the 1916 rebellion. Badly damaged, it was reconstructed behind its surviving 1815 classical facade in 1929. Opposite the post office stood Nelson’s Pillar, a landmark for generations of Dubliners. Built in 1808, it was mysteriously blown up late one night in 1966. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dublin Corporation (now Dublin City Council) began upgrading both the street and its shops, cutting down the century-old London plane trees that lined the centre and erecting the Spire.

At the top of O’Connell Street, Bartholomew Mosse constructed his Rotunda Hospital, the “Lying-In,” which remains a maternity hospital to this day. The rotunda itself is now the historic Gate Theatre. Behind the hospital is Parnell (formerly Rutland) Square, laid out in 1750, with many of its original Georgian houses still intact. One of these, built for the earl of Charlemont in 1762–65, now houses the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

The 18th-century city commissioners circumscribed the growing city with the North and South Circular roads. Synge Street, close to the South Circular Road, was the birthplace of the dramatist George Bernard Shaw. The Grand Canal was constructed to the south and the Royal Canal to the north of these peripheral roads; both canals enter the Liffey at the harbour entrance and both connect with the River Shannon. Only the Grand is now navigable.

Dublin’s Phoenix Park is Europe’s largest enclosed urban park. It is roughly ovoid in shape, with a land perimeter of 7 miles (11 km), and is situated on the north bank of the Liffey, about 2 miles (3 km) west of the city centre. In September 1979, during the first visit by a reigning pontiff to Ireland, the religious service conducted by Pope John Paul II in the park attracted an estimated 1.25 million people, the largest gathering ever recorded in the country. Duels took place in the park, and in 1882 it was the scene of an assassination that involved the stabbing of the British chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his undersecretary, T.H. Burke (see Phoenix Park murders). Initially a royal deer park, Phoenix Park was opened to the public in 1747. Its zoo, celebrated for lion breeding, opened in 1831 and effectively doubled its size in 2001 when the African Plains section opened on land donated by the president of Ireland from the presidency’s official holdings. The 205-foot (62-metre) Wellington Monument is at the southeast end of the park, commemorating Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington. Nearby is Islandbridge, the site of World War I memorial gardens designed by Sir Edwin Luytens.