DUBLIN 1610 to 1756 the Period of This Fascicle Is Framed by the Work of Two Important South-East
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View from the Phoenix Park, c. 1753 (Tudor 3) DUBLIN 1610 TO 1756 The period of this fascicle is framed by the work of two important south-east. From the 1660s, the city authorities became heavily involved in cartographers — John Speed and John Rocque — whose maps of Dublin development alongside private entrepreneurs. While the earlier phase was are separated by 146 years. Although Speed’s map of 1610 (Map 5) depicts characterised by a traditional mentality in respect of facilities and buildings, an essentially late medieval city, there are features that distance the viewer development and planning on a broader canvas elicited fresh thinking: for from ‘Dublin’s complex and convoluted medieval imprint’.1 While the walls example, the privatisation of former communal land. Charles Brooking’s and gates of the city are prominently displayed, details of the intramural area cartographical and architectural depictions of Dublin in 1728 bear witness are limited and important sites, such as Christ Church Cathedral and Dublin not just to the evolution of these plans, but also to a third major development: Castle, contracted owing to the smallness of the map’s scale. In part, this the laying out of a ‘multi-centred metropolis’, born of grandiose and practical method of presentation permitted the inclusion of the four extramural suburbs, aspirations on the part of the state as well as civic leaders, and marked by allowing full play to the delineation of the two largest former monastic sites expansiveness in public architectural and infrastructural projects. Countering — those of St Mary’s Abbey and St Thomas’s Abbey — as well as St Patrick’s the centrifugal force of suburbanisation was a burgeoning official desire for Cathedral. In the case of the transpontine suburb of Oxmantown, connected development that underpinned decision-making in respect of infrastructure, to the urban core by the single bridge across the free-flowing and tidal River transport and planning. It is this emergent cosmopolis that may be glimpsed Liffey, the only features named besides St Mary’s Abbey are St Michan’s in the delineations of John Rocque in 1756. Church and the Inns.2 At first glance, Speed’s map displays the haphazard As background to these perspectives on a period of rapid development, heritage of generations of medieval growth, yet it also raises questions about the growth of the size and population of Dublin may be noted. In the century the integrity of these developments for the future. Two features presage a and a half between 1610 and 1756, prodigious physical and demographic new era in the building of the city. First, in the cramped old urban confines, expansion occurred. In terms of extent, the area of intensive urbanisation two broken streetscapes denote the legacy of the devastating gunpowder increased by at least threefold from approximately 11.8 hectares in 1610 explosion of 1597, which necessitated major reconstruction in the decades to about 35.7 hectares in 1756 (Map 17).7 The built-up area to the south that followed. Secondly, the map opens out to show three relatively recent of the river at the latter date incorporates the streetscapes from just east of institutions outside the walls, indicating an eastern growth of the city that Trinity College and St Stephen’s Green to Dolphin’s Barn and St James’s had become well established by 1756: the College (opened on the site of All Gate in the west. To the north of the River Liffey, housing was continuous Saints’ Priory in 1592), Carey’s Hospital (built about 1603) and the Bridewell from east of the new Sackville Street to just west of Oxmantown Green. (constructed about 1604), all down-river from the medieval core.3 The city’s north–south extent was from Dorset Street to Newmarket. The John Rocque’s map of 1756 shows the complete absorption of the walled population grew from approximately 10,000 at the earlier date through city within a massively expanded urban area (Map 16). Apart from just over 75,000 in 1710 to about 150,000 in 1756. As an intermediate marker, Sir a dozen churches, the two cathedrals, the old bridge and one of the towers William Petty reckoned the population of the city in 1682 was 58,694, based of Dublin Castle, little remains visible of the medieval fabric, including the on his observation of the pattern of births, baptisms and deaths, and also the mural fortifications.4 The tortuous contours of the streets and lanes of the number of houses in the city, which he thought somewhat underestimated at old core contrast with the grid-planned Jervis and Gardiner neighbourhoods 6,025. Although the accuracy of his figures may be questioned, Petty attested to the north of the River Liffey, and the Aungier, Dawson and Molesworth to the quickening rate of house-building at the time: he stated that 150 houses estates to the south. Four new bridges span the River Liffey, which has been had been constructed in the previous decade.8 channelled within a system of quays and riparian plots, the hub now being the reconstructed Essex Bridge (later Grattan Bridge) (Map 15). Older suburbs * * * have become part of new quarters to the north and south of the former walled For the first six or seven decades of the seventeenth century the medieval area. The presence of many timber yards and small quarries attests the tempo fabric of Dublin, concentrated mostly in the old city area, was maintained of building activity throughout the urban area. Of the medieval commonages, with difficulty. Civic and religious buildings that continued in use were in only Oxmantown Green and Little Green remain, both in much reduced form constant need of refurbishment or complete reconstruction, but many private owing to the encroachment of development on communal lands, including dwellings in the late Tudor cage-work style survived in centrally located St Stephen’s Green. Manifesting the fulfilment of the morphological trends streets.9 In 1620, Luke Gernon described the buildings of Dublin as being of the earlier map, the city as presented by Rocque is a balanced and predominantly ‘of timber’. Public and private edifices began to be built in symmetrical entity. The new developments to the east of the medieval core brick in Dublin at the start of the seventeenth century, but the great age of reflect the ‘spirit for elegance and improvement’ associated with enlightened brick-building in the city lay in the succeeding century. According to Harris planning.5 few, if any, of the Jacobean houses built ‘of lime, stone or brick’ existed in A number of themes arising out of these observations will be explored to the 1760s, though some of those from the reign of King Charles I (1625– convey an understanding of the morphology of the early modern city. First, 49) did, including a large one on Winetavern Street built in 1641.10 Poor the ‘palimpsest’6 of medieval Dublin began to be effaced in the first phase immigrants to the city tended to cluster in the suburbs in the early decades of of significant urban expansion in the early to mid-seventeenth century. To the seventeenth century, erecting flimsy shanties of timber, mud and straw, about 1660, the attrition of the stock of medieval buildings and structures which were rather grandiosely called ‘cottages’.11 proceeded alongside projects for the development of extramural precincts on The military, economic and social effects of warfare in mid-century were municipal as well as former monastic lands to the north-east and south. The manifested in urban decay, a decline in population (compounded by a severe urban fabric that was in a poor state in the earlier seventeenth century was visitation of plague in 1650) and the ruinous condition of housing, some eventually subject to systematic demolition to make way for an increasing of which had to be demolished in the 1650s.12 The late medieval defensive volume of traffic, though some older buildings and structures were renovated. features of Dublin — walls, mural towers and gates — lacked a raison d’être, The maps of Bernard de Gomme and Thomas Phillips of 1673 and 1685 certainly after the mid-seventeenth century, and subsequently had a fairly respectively attest to the transition. Secondly, the concept of urban estates had short life. While the municipal authorities attempted to shore up remaining emerged by the end of the seventeenth century, by which time the principle stretches of the mural perimeter from Buttevant Tower to Bysse’s Tower in of planned development of land banks in private and civic ownership was 1612 and from Bridge Gate to Pricket’s Tower in 1672, for example, by as beginning to transform vast areas of the city, especially to the north-east and early as 1642 it was recognised that the walls were ruinous to the point of 2 IRISH HISTORIC TOWNS ATLAS being dangerous. Gradually, sections of the wall began to be taken down, Unlike the medieval parishes, which retained their religious purpose the ‘much decayed’ span from Essex Gate to Isolde’s Tower going in 1681 as well as their topographical identity into the early modern period, the and that from Fagan’s Tower to Newgate being levelled in 1733, for instance monastic estates of the Dublin area were obliterated during the period under (Map 13, Appendix C).13 review, if not before. Already by 1610, changes of use, such as those of St The gates of Dublin, described generally as being ‘in need of repair’ Saviour’s Priory to an inn of court and All Saints’ Priory to a university, had in 1667,14 were successively dismantled from the late seventeenth century been fully effected.