Sherry FitzGerald is hard at work on producing individual histories of every district and locality in the city so as to give prospective buyers a more complete view of the area they're buying in to. Rose Doyle reports

Dublin, as we all know, was rare and wonderful in the auld times. Trams ran on time, traffic wasn't an issue, an evil miasma rolled in off the Liffey and herds of animals thundered through the streets. And that was just the much recorded city centre.

The great heart of the suburbs, neighbourhoods and "villages" of the capital has never had as lively a press, nor anything like the same historical and poetic attention.

All changed. Agents Sherry FitzGerald are at the hard work stage of a good idea, producing individual histories of every district and locality in the city. Rathmines, Bray, Howth, Raheny, Dalkey, Terenure, Rathgar - all will be accounted for, all will have their story told.

The series will cover some 30 localities and the aim is to have the project completed, and home owners across the capital in possession of a brochure about their neighbourhood, within nine months.

Things are moving along nicely. The story of Rathmines and Rathgar is finished and has already been delivered via direct mail shots to some 6,500 homes in the last few weeks. Bray is also up and running and Terenure almost there. "The drafts of between 15 and 20 others are pretty well completed," Mark FitzGerald says. "The hope is that it'll make a book eventually, but that's another day's work, and for the future."

With the overall title "Yesteryears", the series is published in a little larger than A4 size and illustrated with evocative black and white photographs. Mark FitzGerald, acutely conscious of sensitivities and loyalties within individual districts, is very anxious to get things right. To this end he'd like anyone with memories of their part of Dublin, or more especially with pictures offering an interesting or different perspective, to get in touch with the agency. The idea for the series has been "incubating for a couple of years", according to Mark FitzGerald, with the genesis in conversation with Prof Mary Daly following the 1998 publication of the very successful Dublin's Victorian Houses. A & A Farmer, in association with Sherry FitzGerald, were the publishers and Daly (along with Mona Hearn and Peter Pearson) one of that book's authors. She agreed to organise some of her UCD history students to gather facts and information on the various neighbourhoods and a writing group was established. Journalist Tom Doorly (sp.?) later came on board as did Dr Garret FitzGerald, father of Mark and a man with a long and prodigious memory of the city and its workings.

"Myself and my father got a good bit of the 'Rathmines and Rather' story together," Mark says, "and we're hoping that the series in general will be a bit like that - with a lot of the history related in personal anecdote."

The FitzGerald clan are certainly contributing in force. Dalkey will benefit from Mark FitzGerald's memory of his grandmother's memory of the first car appearing on the roads in that neighbourhood. And in a personal perspective piece in the Rathmines and Rathgar story, Dr Garret Fitzgerald tells how, during the war years, his parents paid £120 rent per year for "Lonsdale", a large house on a half acre on Temple Road, Dartry.

"Making full allowance for the change in money values since 1945," Dr Fitzgerald writes, "this is the equivalent of less than €6,500 today." He talks about how good public transport was at the time, about the Drum Battery Train (a native-built precursor to the DART) and about gas-fired cars and horse drawn vehicles. The Terenure brochure also benefits from Dr FitzGerald's memory for fact and anecdote. In it he tells how, in 1959 after he'd inherited some money from his grandfather, he was able to buy a six-bedroom house on one-third of an acre on Eglinton Road, Donnybrook, for £4, 300. He sold it, in the aftermath of the oil crisis in 1974, for £31,000.

Traffic congestion in 1959 was "not a problem", he writes, "with only 36,000 cars in use as against over 400,000 today".

But the series goes back far and beyond the 20th century. Elsewhere in the Terenure brochure we're given a picture of life centred around a castle, six dwellings (including a mill) and a population of 20 people in 1640. Research failed to turn up any great excitement there over the years, however - not even an early mention of the area until, in the 13th century, it's referred to in the Register of St John the Baptist, without Newgate, Dublin, as Tyrinwer or Tyrnwyre. Terenure was countrified until the 1920s, when serious house building began. It was incorporated into the city in 1932 and the last tram ran there in 1949. A house on Terenure Road West which cost £16,300 in 1970 is today valued at €850,000 (£669,429).

Rathmines and Rathgar was a more robust place to be down the years. The "Yersteryear" account tells how, in the 1700s, "Dubliners used to leave the city to travel out to Ranelagh to pick blackberries and shoot game, to the Dodder at Milltown for recreation and to Dundrum for fresh air and the milk of mountain goats. Rathmines and Rathgar on the other hand did not have such recreational facilities and in fact were rural neighbourhoods with small populations."

Small but significant. The Battle of Rathmines, in which the Parliamentarians of Dublin defeated the Royalists and allowed Oliver Cromwell begin his murderous journeying across the land, was fought on August 2nd, 1649. In 1901 there were 5,300 people living in Rathmines of which some 1,300 were female servants and the area became part of Dublin city in 1930.

Rathgar's development began in the 1750s with the building of a new road. It developed in tandem with Rathmines and in 1837 is described as "consisting of several ranges of pleasant houses and numerous detached villas".

Mark FitzGerald feels good about the project, and very personally committed. "People like to know about where they live, about the area's history and present day services. We're also getting together a series of booklets on the services available in each area, but that's a separate project. When people come to an estate agents it's to either buy or sell but we're offering something beyond the usual. The booklets will be nice to keep and useful for local school projects too.

"They're free, of course, and will be there for the future. When people are looking at houses we'll be giving them the brochure of the area."