DUBLIN: Books on Dublin are nothing new, especially around Christmas. Just as it became a convenient quarry for the construction industry, the city has been a source of endless fascination for writers. The trick is to find a new angle or perspective, or to explore a hitherto neglected area of its development, writes Frank McDonald.
The New Neighbourhood of Dublin. By Joseph Hone, Maurice Craig and
Michael Fewer. A. and A. Farmar. €30
Dublin, 1910-1940. By Ruth McManus. Four Courts Press, 512pp. €45 hk, €24.95 pk
Decorative Dublin. By Peter Pearson. O'Brien Press, 160pp. €30
Maurice Craig is no stranger to Dublin bookshelves. His classic Dublin 1670-1860, first published in 1952, has both informed and inspired at least two generations of readers, including me. He is our most distinguished architectural historian, so much so that the Prince of Wales called on him for tea.
In 1949, Dr Craig and the late Joseph Hone, a biographer and "man of letters", wrote a guide to Dublin based on taking 21 different routes from the GPO in O'Connell Street to the county boundary and describing buildings of interest along the way. (The title is taken from Weston St John Joyce.)
The book never saw the light of day, probably because Dublin was taken for granted at the time and their putative publishers believed it would be of little interest. A copy of the manuscript was given to the National Library, and there it remained until architect Michael Fewer learned of its existence.
He re-traced Craig and Hone's 21 routes, noting what had changed in the intervening years. And, despite the suburban explosion over the past half-century, which has roughly tripled Dublin's footprint, the most surprising thing is that more than 80 per cent of the 546 buildings noted in 1949 still survive.
The original text by Craig and Hone has now been published in its entirety, bar the odd "gross error or piece of ignorance", with a parallel commentary by Michael Fewer on each facing page, complete with route maps and photographs of some of the featured buildings. As a "then and now" curiosity, it is compelling.
As Fewer points out, the Ireland of 1949 was very different to the Ireland of today. Rationing was still in force, fuel was in short supply, tuberculosis was still widespread, the arrival of television was more than a decade away and the Catholic Church wielded great influence in a deeply conservative society.
All has changed utterly, including the settings of most of the noted buildings - especially in what were then more remote areas where tens of thousands of people now live. Indeed, the population of Co Dublin (outside the city boundary) more than quadrupled, from 130,000 in 1949 to around 577,000 today.
Nearly all of the buildings mentioned in the 1949 text pre-date the 20th century. Modern architecture was overlooked by the authors, even landmarks such as the Imco dry-cleaning works on Merrion Road. A fine example of the International Style, it would have been less than 20 years old at the time; by 1980, it was gone.
The great period of 20th-century town planning in Ireland is covered by Ruth McManus in Dublin, 1910-1940. This is the second volume in a series edited by Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms on the city's development from its earliest days. The first volume, Dublin Through Space and Time, was published last year.
It must be acknowledged that the Free State government has never been given enough credit for rebuilding Dublin after the devastation caused during the 1916 Rising and the Civil War. Even in those penny-pinching days, it managed to rebuild the GPO, the Custom House and the Four Courts as well as most of O'Connell Street.
Not only that. In the drive to provide better housing for those living in squalid, over-crowded tenements, Dublin Corporation laid out and built the Marino estate on garden city principles and started developing Crumlin along the same lines. Griffith Avenue, the finest legacy of modern planning in Ireland, also dates from this period.
Dr McManus documents how all of this was done in a book illustrated by countless maps, drawings and photographs. And though many of the more grandiose plans by Patrick Abercrombie and others were never realised, there was a remarkable civic spirit in the air and what was actually achieved can still be regarded as heroic.
"Strain-built" is a term implying intrinsic quality that crops up regularly in property advertisements, even though few know anything about Alexander Strain, who built much of Drumcondra and Glasnevin. The author traces his remarkable career, culminating in the splendid Cremore estate, where he spent his retirement.
Though there were gerry-builders then, they were not so numerous as now. Strain, a stout Protestant from Cremore in Co Armagh, came from a craft tradition that has since been largely lost. One cannot imagine that residents of the sprawling Kilnamanagh estate in Tallaght would market their homes as "Brennan and McGowan-built".
In the mid-1930s, the development of Mount Merrion as a private garden suburb promised "Ideal Homes \ Sunshine, Good Sanitation, Health, Happiness" at prices ranging from - wait for it! - £850 to £1,200 (€1,080 to €1,524). A 1936 advertisement in The Irish Times even referred to the availability of a kindergarten.
The development of Dublin's earliest real suburbs, heavily influenced by modern thinking on town planning, is meticulously detailed by Dr McManus, in some cases on a street-by-street basis. It is an illuminating book, all the more so for those who live in these areas, because it shows how they came into being in an era of thrift.
For the artist and conservationist, Peter Pearson, god has always been in the details. His latest book, Decorative Dublin, offers a lavishly illustrated celebration of the city's "rich legacy of beautiful minutiae" in its iron, brick and stonework, its doors, fanlights, windows and richly-decorated 18th-century plasterwork.
Pearson is something of an architectural magpie, who has personally rescued hundreds of period features from demolition sites over the past 20 years or more. Clearly devoted to preserving and recording the historic fabric of Dublin, he has a mission to inform, and writes with enthusiasm and knowledge about his subject.
This book will be a revelation to people who rarely notice anything above the fascia level of shops. It is also divided into bite-sized pieces covering everything from gates and railings to towers and turrets. Like the other two works reviewed here, it should remind us that the city itself is an artifact that deserves to be treasured.
Frank McDonald is Environment Editor of The Irish Times and author of The Destruction of Dublin, Saving the City and The Construction of Dublin