ARCHITECTURE: FRANK McDONALDreviews Victorian Dublin RevealedBy Michael Barry Andalus Press, 192pp. ¤24.99
AT THE OUTSET of this colourful and engaging book, Michael Barry writes that we have taken Victorian Dublin for granted – even though many of us live or work in 19th-century buildings and we are still using all the infrastructure of the Victorian era: water supplies, drainage, bridges, railways and most of the original train stations.
The book is a celebration of the remarkable legacy of Victorian times, long overshadowed by the Georgian city. Indeed, the author notes that “there are probably more remains of that era in Dublin than in most comparable cities” in these islands – not least because it wasn’t carpet-bombed during the second World War.
Victorian Dublin was “generally a comfortable place for the middle class, ensconced in its expanding suburbs” and removed from the teeming tenements in town. The once fiercely independent Rathmines Township was the quintessential example of “those 19th-century suburbs that form a red-brick necklace around the central city”.
The author, who took all the photographs himself (starting in the 1980s), makes it clear that he did not set out to write a “formal tome on Victorian architecture in Dublin”, but rather a “personal, perhaps idiosyncratic, evocation of the spirit of Victorian Dublin portrayed through photographs of what remains” – which is a lot.
He deals with everything, including statuary, and nominates John Henry Foley’s bronze of Prince Albert – still standing on the south side of Leinster Lawn – as “arguably the finest statue in Dublin”. The often vainglorious monuments to Dublin’s Protestant mercantile class in Mount Jerome Cemetery are also featured in pictures and text.
The last full century of the “800 years of oppression” left a quite remarkable collection of cultural buildings, notably the National Library, the National Museum, the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland. The National Gallery was championed by William Dargan, “father of Irish railways”, who refused British monarch’s offer of a knighthood.
Even in the midst of squalor and disease, Dublin also acquired some of its finest hospitals during the 19th century – the Mater, the Richmond, the Dental Hospital, the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear, the Royal City of Dublin (Baggot Street) and Portrane asylum, as well as the McGeogh Home for “elderly ladies of good character” on Cowper Road in Rathmines.
Barry was given free rein to take a spectacular series of photographs inside Freemasons’ Hall on Molesworth Street. He also records the charming, probably satirical, depiction of monkeys playing billiards at the former Kildare Street Club, but doesn’t note that much of its interior – including the great staircase hall – was ripped out in the 1970s.
He extols Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward’s Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin as “one of the finest Victorian buildings” in the city, which is certainly true. But it would also have been useful to show St Ann’s Schools and Molesworth Hall (by the same architects), hacked down in the mid-1970s after being branded “decrepit business premises”.
Barry does illustrate the Venetian-style Crown Life Insurance building on the corner of Dame Street and Fownes Street, facing the Central Bank plaza. Of course, there wouldn’t have been a plaza at all to plant trees (or latterly to occupy) if an assembly of equally ornate 19th-century buildings hadn’t been demolished to make way for the bank’s tower.
College Green and Dame Street were Dublin’s financial centre then, lined with banks that were “built to inspire confidence” (unlike, say, the former Anglo Irish “Bank” on St Stephen’s Green). They were impressive and substantial, with elaborate banking halls – none more sumptuous than the former Hibernian Bank at the corner of Church Lane.
The author might have noted that Pim’s “tall and well-lit” department store on South Great George’s Street was replaced by the execrable Castle House office block, from the 1970s. But not many people would know that the Shelbourne Hotel was remodelled in 1865 by John McCurdy, the same architect who extended Kilmainham Gaol.
The book is excellent on the development of Rathmines, noting that 46 per cent of its population in 1871 was Protestant. Indeed, the justification for building the Church of the Three Patrons on Rathgar Road, with its very plain front, was “to make it easier for domestic servants of the locality (most of whom were Catholic) to attend Mass”.
Sectarianism surfaced after the foundation stone was laid with, as Barry notes, The Irish Times (then avowedly unionist) thundering in March 1860: “On Sunday last, the Protestant and quiet township of Rathgar was the scene of mob-fanaticism and priestly display. A Chapel, it seems, is to depreciate the value of the property of the neighbourhood.”
Up to half of Britain’s military garrison in Ireland was based in Dublin, so “there was a palpable military presence all over the city [with] parades, reviews, redcoats in the streets, genteel housing for officers in Rathmines [and] busy brothels” – not in Rathmines, of course, but in Monto, where Corporation and Foley Streets are today.
Marlborough (now McKee) Barracks was the finest of the lot, fit for the cavalry (as it still is). “An eclectic mix of turrets, great chimney-stacks and a multitude of dormer windows”, it was designed by the royal engineers department in Britain. “The story that the drawings were inadvertently sent to Dublin instead of India is apocryphal,” Barry says.
Industry in Victorian Dublin was dominated by Guinness, which proudly ran the largest brewery in the world at St James’s Gate, and society was led by Guinness notables such as Lord Iveagh and Lord Ardilaun. The former created Iveagh House, with its splendid ballroom, and the latter gave St Stephen’s Green to the people of Dublin as a public park.
It is unfortunate that their signal contribution to social housing – the marvellous Iveagh Trust scheme of flats, shops, public baths, a hostel for the homeless and (later) the Bull Alley school, all built between Patrick Street and Bride Street – is misrepresented by a photograph of the rather pale imitation by Dublin Corporation on Nicholas Street.
But such failings are minor. Victorian Dublin Revealed will come as a revelation to many readers, encouraging us to open our eyes to the wealth of Victoriana all around us.
Frank McDonald is Environment Editor of The Irish Times
