3 the Changing Face of Dublin, 1550–1750

3 The Changing Face of Dublin, 1550–1750 COLM LENNON ALTHOUGH ITS CITIZENS PRIDED THEMSELVES on living in ‘the Irishe or yong London’,1 sixteenth-century Dublin had neither the reach nor the appearance of a national capital. Before 1550, the city’s effective jurisdiction did not extend much beyond the eastern region of Ireland which incorporated the English Pale, south Leinster and east Munster. Down to the 1550s Irish parliamentary sessions were regularly held outside Dublin, the four central courts had no permanent domicile, and the royal castle which housed the viceroy’s administration was partly ruinous.2 Efforts to appoint a viceregal suite in the dissolved priory of the knights hospitaller of St John at Kilmainham, one and a half miles (2.5 km) to the west of the city, proved to be less than successful.3 Apart from the castle there was a dearth of public building. State and civic business was sometimes conducted in Christ Church cathedral but a major collapse of the roof of the nave in 1562 betokened the building’s decay.4 The extra-mural cathedral, St Patrick’s, and the rest of the urban parish churches were comparatively small. The tholsel or town hall in St Werburgh’s Street, the focus of Dublin municipal life, was an embarrassment to the corporation because of its ramshackle condition, and guildhalls similarly lacked distinction.5 As a commercial hub, Dublin’s position was not superior to that of Drogheda— also on the east coast—in terms of its nexus of trade routes, while the ports of Waterford, Limerick and Galway on the south and west coasts were the real emporia of British and continental traffic. An English commissioner visiting Limerick in the 1530s, for example, gushed that it was ‘a wondrous proper city and strong . it may be 1 R. Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’ in Holinshed’s Irish chronicle, ed. L. Miller and E. Power (Dublin, 1979), p. 39. 2 S. Ellis, Ireland in the age of the Tudors: English expansion and the end of Gaelic rule (London, 1998), pp. 372–5; C. Kenny, King’s Inn and the kingdom of Ireland: the Irish ‘Inn of Court’, 1541–1800 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 72–4, 111–13, 232–4; C. Lennon, The lords of Dublin in the age of Reformation (Dublin, 1989), p. 33. 3 C. Kenny, Kilmainham: the story of a settlement older than Dublin (Dublin, 1995), pp. 37–8. 4 Cf. R. Gillespie, ed., The proctor’s accounts of Peter Lewis, 1564–1565 (Dublin, 1996), pp. 13–14. 5 Lennon, Lords of Dublin,p.33. Proceedings of the British Academy, 107, 39–52. © The British Academy 2001. Copyright © British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved 40 Colm Lennon called little London for the situation and plenty’.6 The Shannonside port was able to accommodate ships of up to 400 tons.7 By contrast, the sand-bar at the mouth of Dublin’s haven was a significant handicap, as the wharves and unlading facilities at the quayside were inaccessible to all but the lightest vessels.8 Whatever its pretensions to urban pre-eminence, the colonial mentality of the citizens and its smallness of scale precluded Dublin from performing a rôle as a national cynosure for the island’s population. The period under review here witnessed a major transformation from which Dublin emerged as a national capital of European dimensions by the later eighteenth century.9 Of fundamental importance of course was a massive population increase, entailing at least a tenfold growth from a possible figure of 10,000–15,000 for the later 1500s. Political, economic and social changes produced a confident urban élite which was pos- itively disposed towards embracing Dublin’s centrality in the newly-established kingdom of Ireland. This process came to be reflected slowly in a coherent approach to the planning and development of the city, and in innovative attitudes in respect of the organisation of building projects. Dublin’s changing face was turned ever more relent- lessly eastwards towards the sea during this era, the tendency being dictated not just by considerations of commerce and communication but also by questions of style and fashionability. Thus the city’s new countenance was becoming suitably bedizened (in consonance with its enhanced status) with grand public buildings including the parliament house, magnificent squares, stately malls and grid-planned suburbs. Prima facie and de facto Dublin was a capital city by 1750.10 It may be instructive to begin by providing spatial and temporal perspectives from which urban development in the two-hundred-year span can be considered. A series of maps gives a useful overview. In the map of 1610 by John Speed (see Figure 3.1) (the first actual delineation of the city) the intramural area dominates, occupying about one-ninth of a square mile (70 acres or 30 hectares). Some ribbon suburban development is evident, in conjunction with former monasteries such as St Thomas Court, or, as in the case of the transpontine suburb of Oxmantown, the parish church of St Michan. In 1610, the old bridge is still the only one spanning the Liffey, but three rel- atively recent features to the east of the walls indicate the directional trend of building as well as social and cultural developments: the college, established on the site of All Hallows monastery in 1592, Carey’s Hospital built about 1603, and the bridewell 6 Cited in B. Bradshaw, ed., ‘Father Wolfe’s description of Limerick, 1574’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal,17 (1975), 48. 7 Ibid., 47. 8 Lennon, Lords of Dublin, pp. 21–2, 25–6. 9 Cf. P. Clark and B. Lepetit, eds, Capital cities and their hinterlands in early modern Europe (Aldershot, 1996), introduction, pp. 2–7, for a discussion of the characteristic features of capital cities. 10 The spirit and essence of this period is captured in M. Craig, Dublin, 1660–1860 (Dublin, 1952). Copyright © British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved DUBLIN’S CHANGING FACE 41 Figure 3.1. Dublin in 1610, by John Speed. constructed about 1604.11 Each of these establishments became embedded in the urban growth occasioned by the eastward thrust of building in the succeeding half century. The next map dates from 1673 (see Figure 3.2) and immediately there can be seen the diminished though not insignificant proportion of the built-up space the old urban core now occupies.12 Aided by the reclamation projects along the right bank of the river, building has been drawn along the line of Dame’s Street in Hoggen Green towards the College. Also apparent are the suburban developments of the Aungier estate to the 11 For an illuminating interpretation of Speed’s map, see J.A. Andrews, ‘The oldest map of Dublin’, Royal Irish Academy Proceedings, section C, 83 (1983), 205–37. 12 This 1673 map, after Bernard de Gomme, and the 1756 one after John Rocque, are reproduced by kind permis- sion of Dr Jacqueline R. Hill, author of From patriots to unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patri- otism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997). Copyright © British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved Copyright © British Academy 2001 –all rights reserved Figure 3.2. Dublin, c.1673 (after Bernard de Gomme). DUBLIN’S CHANGING FACE 43 south13 and the Jervis estate on the lands on the left bank formerly belonging to St Mary’s Abbey. A second bridge has been erected, perhaps in vain anticipation of westerly settlement associated with the development of the old commons of Oxmantown Green. More significantly St Stephen’s Green to the south-east has been walled and partly built around. The 1756 map (see Figure 3.3) shows the complete absorption of the walled city within the expanding urban area, reflecting the redundancy of the medieval fortifica- tions. The Liffey is channelled within reclaimed riparian lotts, presaging further development of Dublin’s easterly orientation. The building-up of the suburb to the south-east has encompassed such fashionable streets as Grafton, Dawson and Nassau, and paralleling this in the north-eastern quarter is the Gardiner estate, incorporating the elegant Sackville Street or Mall. Development on the earl of Meath’s estate to the south-west included the woollen workers’ area of the liberties. Three new bridges span the Liffey, the most important being Essex Bridge, a hub of new thoroughfares until the erection of Carlisle Bridge in the early 1790s. Among the stately new buildings erected by this date are the west front of Trinity (1750s), the Parliament House (1731), Kildare (now Leinster) House (1745), the older Custom House of 1707, and, to the west, the Royal Barracks (1705) on the north bank and the Royal Hospital (1685) on the south.14 Four phases of urban development are represented by these maps. The first runs from the dissolution of the Dublin monasteries about 1540 to the great gunpowder explosion at the quayside in 1597 which caused massive damage in the heart of the old city. Although there was little significant new domestic or public building at the time, a lively market in property leases was stimulated by the dispersal of former monastic property, and the corporation land bank also expanded substantially. Contemporane- ously, sedentary central government spawned a large bureaucracy which attracted many newcomers from England. During the second phase, from the early seventeenth century down to the 1640s, settled conditions fostered population increase and economic growth. Rebuilding of utilities and facilities necessitated by the explosion was concentrated on extramural ‘greenfield’ sites to the east of the walls, as was the laying out of new streets. A key development was the reclamation of the Liffey–Poddle con- fluence by private enterprise on corporation land which provided a springboard for easterly commercial and residential expansion.

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