LOCAL HISTORY:THE MAKING OF a city is an amazing process. Seeing the way that buildings, big personalities and the efforts of citizens come together to form its beginnings is fascinating.

Dubliners are lucky to have such visible striations in their history: they can see where the Vikings arrived, where the Normans came and what they brought, and all the other arrivals and departures that make up the rich loam of our capital’s history.

Although it deals with only one building, Surgeons’ Halls: Building the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland 1810-2010 (AA Farmar with the RCSI, €25) is an important and lovely book. Edited by Clive Lee, professor of anatomy at the college, its 168 pages are generously illustrated with architects’ drawings of the building before its construction.

As the RCSI building on St Stephen’s Green is one of the buildings from which Dublin takes a little of its character, it is important to understand why it was built, who built it and what its future may be. These are all questions raised – and largely answered – in the book.

A useful text, long academically discounted but now happily on its way back to reinstatement, is The Book of Howth (Cork University Press). Written in the 1570s by the seventh baron of Howth, Christopher St Lawrence, the text is an invaluable aid to anyone studying the effects of the growing power of the New English and their regime in Dublin Castle.

St Lawrence had been a direct victim of this, spending months imprisoned in the castle for his part in the cess controversy. He was in good company: many of his peers among the Old English were there too. Inevitably, plots and counterplots ensued, and it would appear that St Lawrence was lucky to get out of the castle with his head still attached to his shoulders.

He was later imprisoned for the most appalling domestic violence against his wife, his daughter and a domestic servant, which suggest to the reader that St Lawrence may not have been completely sane. Be that as it may, St Lawrence has done historians everywhere a favour with his book, which contains probably the best description we have or are likely to get of our capital in the late 16th century.

Valerie McGowan-Doyle, a lecturer in Irish and British history at Kent State University and John Carroll University, has rendered the manuscript accessible to 21st-century readers. Her book is handsome, fascinating and, above all, readable. It is to her that we owe our thanks for making St Lawrence’s book academically respectable again.

Glendalough: City of God (Four Courts Press, €45) deals with a much older reality. Edited by Charles Doherty, Linda Doran and Mary Kelly, this is a collection of essays originally presented at a one-day seminar on the Co Wicklow settlement.

It is a substantial volume, generously illustrated. Near the end is an amazing chapter by Máirín Ní Cheallaigh describing how, in the late 19th century, Glendalough was almost overwhelmed by tourists and tour operators, who virtually took over the City of God, turning it into a “city of the dead” in accordance with the popular melancholy mood of the times.

It’s a chapter about the meaning, in national and international terms, of the site at Glendalough, and, like the rest of the book, it features provocative and perceptive writing. It is much more than a guidebook.

Still in suburbia but much closer to the city centre is the area covered in Tony O’Doherty’s A History of Glasnevin: Its Village, Lands and People (Original Writing, €22.50). With its roots in a monastery founded by St Mobhi in the sixth century, Glasnevin had a chequered past, becoming in the 18th century a fashionable area for the prosperous classes and writers such as Swift and his friend Patrick Delany. A century later the area became the site of the botanical gardens and of the country’s largest cemetery.

In 1901 Glasnevin became incorporated in Dublin city and quickly developed into a “red-brick” suburb. Today it retains many of the characteristics of a village, while its largely Victorian housing stock makes it one of the most desirable addresses on the northside. The book is illustrated with black-and-white images of many of these and of other buildings in the area.

Every city needs volunteers to provide services when privately funded services cant provide them. The lifeboats are a case in point, and Valentia Lifeboats: A History (History Press, €19.99) makes the case. Written by Dick Robinson, who has been with Valentia Lifeboat for the past 60 years, the book is an often thrilling account of lives saved (and, sadly, sometimes lost), of mountainous seas and bad weather and bad luck, as well as the good luck and happy chances that often save lives. Dick Robinson is a great writer, which gives his book its character and makes the whole thing live.

Noeleen Dowling is a local historian