Architect Niall McCullough's history of Dublin development points to what we are in danger of losing, writes Gemma Tipton
Defined by the cut of the canals, the city of Dublin is full of mysteries and stories. "Mysteries and stories" is a much better way of putting it than "history". The idea of history tends to put a lot of people off . . . but hearing about a place through the telling of tales, and reading about the reasons why things are the way and shape they are, is a very good route to falling in love with it. Architect Niall McCullough is in love with Dublin, and the stories he celebrates in his new book are not so much the stories of individual people, but of the city herself.
Dublin An Urban Historylooks at a city based on desire lines (the paths people carve out of the land by walking the same routes), the ancient Slighe (the "ways" travelled by pre-Christian people to meet at the site where Dublin now lies), on Viking settlement, and on the grander schemes of the Georgians and the Victorians. Going through its pages is a journey of discovery. It also makes us realise that perhaps, despite all our present urgent development, not so much has really changed.
The book was first written (this is an updated version) in 1989 against what McCullough describes as a "background of poverty", and it is what he calls "a particular history of Dublin. The city's people are interesting, but they're not the focus of it." Instead McCullough looks back at ancient maps, etchings and texts, and more recently at old photographs, trying to reimagine past Dublins.
"Could you imagine a Dutch city?" he asks. We once had one, just as we once had a Viking settlement, and a Norman enclave - at which time the streets were first paved, and a bridge and water system put in. "The core is what's left, the plan; and if you can parse out the plan of the city, you have access to a whole different story."
These stories make you begin to think both about what we have lost, and what we are in danger of losing. Would it have saved the older lines of Cork Street had more people known it was the Slige Dala? Would we have more care for Aungier Street if we realised that it is probably the only example in the world of early Christian and classical town planning coming together? This area is built inside a monastic oval, with Aungier Street pushed through the centre, and you can still see its past in plans of the city, although little by little that is being chipped away at, cut into here, stretched out there.
You can see the past in other parts of Dublin too, overlaid by the present in the same way as ancient pagan festivals became what we know as Christmas and Easter. The Viking Hoggen Green became College Green, while the Thingmote, a Viking ceremonial mound, remained until 1685, when it was cleared to make room for Suffolk Street. The name survived until more recently in the Thingmote Pub on Suffolk Street, now another branch of O'Donoghues.
Altering, making room, knocking down and building up has been a characteristic of Dublin's story, and some of these stories can seem very familiar to present-day ears. In the 16th century, says McCullough, there were "complaints of houses built up against the walls of Christchurch which 'doe stopp up the light'. In 1570, Mr Cusack of Rathgar was prosecuted for blocking a lane to St Audeon's church with a house." By the beginning of the 17th century, the crypt of Christchurch had become "tippling rooms for beer, wine and tobacco". In the early 19th century, Dublin's city fathers published a plan to fill the green part of St Stephen's Green with houses, reminiscent of Dartmouth Square today perhaps? Creating Parliament Street, the Wide Streets Commission is said to have initiated the project "by stealth, with workmen reportedly removing roofs from sleeping inhabitants".
In fact, what we think of as the great period of civic improvement under the Georgians, sounds rather contemporary from McCullough's descriptions: "During the passage of Charles, James, William (and Mary), Anne, George I, II, III and IV, Dublin remained a city of gentry, middlemen and soldiers rather than one of kings and grandees; it came of age through decisions taken in panelled offices and drawing rooms by an army of speculators, contractors and clever lawyers . . . This was a city of mathematical profit . . . Important buildings are often located by reason of ownership rather than urban design."
One of the most surprising things to discover about Georgian Dublin is that the buildings, a key part of what we understand as Dublin's heritage, were not built to last. Based on a land-lease system, the terraces and squares were designed to stand for the lifetime of the lease, usually between 40 and 100 years, whereupon they would be torn down and built again. Perhaps, in that sense, it might be less depressing to think of some of the city's latest apartment blocks in a similar light?
Dublin in the 18th century was one of Europe's largest cities. Gardens of the grand houses on Dame Street stretched down through orchards to the Liffey. Landowners carved up their territories for speculative profit, while beyond the city walls in the Liberties, industry filled the warrens of streets between the rivers that created the Coombe. If the soul of Dublin is Georgian, lying in areas of Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square, and along O'Connell Street up to Parnell Square, another more battered soul still exists beyond Christchurch and St Patrick's. Hidden behind the new graceless apartment buildings of Cork Street are tiny cottages, industrial yards, the old square of Newmarket - the past preserved in names like Weaver's Square. The weavers were reputedly a difficult lot, crossing the river to "wage war with the butchers of Ormond Quay," who returned fire by attacking them with their meat hooks.
Dublin, in common with Cork, has lost many rivers (looking at old maps of Cork in fact reveals a city very like Venice in appearance - did you know Patrick Street was once a river?), and it takes a real leap of imagination to see the original shapes of the city in its present pattern. But they are there. Imagining Dublin through the pages of this book is imagining a place where geography and human endeavour have left their marks. "Evidence of prehistoric existence has left an imprint in fields and surrounding hills," writes McCullough. And there are "dark mutterings of ritual and death in passage graves and portal dolmens formed with single stones such as those at Seefin, Drimnagh, Ballyedmonduff or Brennanstown. There were forts at Howth and Dún Laoghaire; mounds stood around the site of College Green. Scratching the surface unearths evidence of unreachable events."
As an architect, McCullough is not arguing for a city preserved in the aspic of the past. What he is suggesting is how an understanding of the old plans of the city can lead to more sensitive developments in the present, an idea to which his firm McCullough Mulvin's own building (with KMD Architecture) in the historic fabric of Trinity, the Ussher Library is testament. Development does not have to be "bad", and modern interventions do not always destroy the past. But does that mean that only architects who really know Dublin should be allowed to build here?
It is true that some of our most recent attempts to commission international signature architecture in the city have fallen rather flat - the Santiago Calatrava James Joyce Bridge, for example, makes no sense in its site; and the Daniel Libeskind performing arts centre in Docklands looks, from the drawings, remarkably similar to his concert hall in Porto. McCullough suggests the answer lies in a mixture of approaches.
"Architecture is full of people who do things from a half-knowledge of place, and you can get wonderful things from that." What we have to guard against, however, is the loss of individuality you get from everyone trying to be special in the same way (which seems to me to be rather like demonstrating your individuality by being on the waiting list for a Prada handbag). Dublin needs to be developed as the expression of a city that comes from its own past, and that is a past that hasn't gone on anywhere else.
While not so many have such a deep knowledge of Dublin's story, we do have a cultural acquaintance with the city, as do millions around the world, from James Joyce's writing. But just as London's cultural, geographical and historical past is being reimagined and re-expressed through the writings of Iain Sinclair, and in Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May detective novels, perhaps it's time to look at our capital city again, through a fresh lens - so that we too can play a part in imagining its future.
If Frank McDonald's series (from The Destruction of Dublin to Chaos at the Crossroads) unravels our recent past, Niall McCullough's Dublin An Urban History is a beautifully illustrated journey further back, through patterns of rivers, desire lines, Viking sites, salt marshes, great public buildings, civic processional routes, gardens, laneways, factories and tenements, to a different way of looking at Dublin, which may yet be the very way to save it. u
• Dublin An Urban History, by Niall McCullough, is published by Anne Street Press on May 2nd. For additional histories of Dublin and a look at the patterns that have shaped it, see also www.reflectingcity.com