Dublin 1847: city of the Ordnance Survey

Frank Cullen

Description

The Ordnance Survey's large-scale town plans for Dublin (1847) are the focus of this book. Forty-five extracts from these richly detailed maps depict the streets, lanes, buildings, gardens, yards and parks of the city with precision, to the extent that individual houses (with numbers), pumps, lamp posts and trees are shown. Author Frank Cullen considers selected features and areas of the mid-nineteenth-century city through the map extracts, using other sources to discuss the elements of urban life that lie behind maps. For example, the formal layout of Merrion Square with its fine buildings and notable residents is contrasted to the densely inhabited warren of lanes behind Mount Street, just minutes away. The impact of public buildings such as the Royal (later Collins's) Barracks is impressively evident in the plan, while the associated professional and trading activities of the surrounding area are less obvious in the unlabelled rows of buildings along Montpellier Hill and Barrack (later Benburb) Street. The maps extracts and commentaries are accompanied by contemporary illustrations; and are preceded by an introductory essay on Dublin in 1847. This is an ancillary publication to the Dublin series from the Irish Historic Towns Atlas. 'Dublin, part III, 1756 to 1847' by Rob Goodbody is also available from the Royal Irish Academy. Author: Frank CullenSeries editors: Anngret Simms, H.B. Clarke, Raymond Gillespie, Jacinta Prunty; Consultant editor: J.H. Andrews; Cartographic editor: Sarah Gearty; Editorial assistants: Angela Murphy, Jennifer Moore, Frank Cullen

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Ireland
• Cartography
• Stephen Ireland

Informations

• Publié par: Royal Irish Academy
• Date de parution: 16 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908997135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DUBLIN 1847
C ITY OF THE O RDNANCE S URVEY
Frank Cullen
First e-published in 2016 by the Royal Irish Academy ( www.ria.ie ), Irish Historic Towns Atlas, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, in association with Dublin City Council ( www.dublincity.ie ), Wood Quay, Dublin 8.
Copyright The Royal Irish Academy
Irish Historic Towns Atlas series editors: Anngret Simms, H.B. Clarke, Raymond Gillespie, Jacinta Prunty; consultant editor: J.H. Andrews; cartographic editor: Sarah Gearty; editorial assistants: Angela Murphy, Jennifer Moore, Frank Cullen.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or any other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or otherwise without either the prior written consent of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, The Writers Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.
While every effort has been made to contact and obtain permission from holders of copyright, if any involuntary infringement of copyright has occurred, sincere apologies are offered, and the owner of such copyright is requested to contact the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record is available from the British Library.
Printed in Ireland by Walsh Colour Print ISBN 978-1-908997-13-5
In memory of Paula my wife, best friend and mother of our beautiful son, Daniel
CONTENTS
Preface
Foreword
Editorial note and abbreviations
List of illustrations
P ART 1: I NTRODUCTION
The Ordnance Survey and the Dublin town plan of 1847
Notes
P ART II: M AP EXTRACTS AND COMMENTARIES
1. Royal Barracks
2. Blue Coat Hospital and Smithfield
3. North city hospital quarter
4. North Dublin Union Workhouse
5. The Phibsborough suburb
6. Broadstone
7. Linen Hall and Queen s Inns
8. King Street North
9. North city markets district
10. Old Jervis estate
11. Rutland Square
12. Mountjoy Square
13. Sackville Street Lower
14. Abbey Street Lower
15. Marlborough Street
16. Beresford Place
17. Custom House Quay
18. Amiens Street railway terminus
19. Aldborough House
20. Patent slip and Halpin s Pond
21. St Mark s maritime quarter
22. Verschoyle and Power s Courts
23. Westland Row
24. Merrion Square and residents
25. Fitzwilliam Square and residents
26. St Stephen s Green
27. Kildare Street and Leinster House
28. Trinity College and Provost s House
29. Carlisle Bridge
30. College Green
31. Dublin Castle and Royal Exchange
32. St Bridget s Parish
33. Portobello Gardens
34. Meath Hospital
35. St Patrick s Cathedral
36. Christchurch Place
37. The Liberties
38. Cork Street Fever Hospital
39. Western industrial quarter
40. Mendicity Institution
41. Grand Canal Harbour
42. South Dublin Union Workhouse
43. South-west hospital quarter
44. King s Bridge railway terminus
45. Kilmainham Gaol
Select bibliography
PREFACE
T his book is one of a number of ancillary publications to the Irish Historic Towns Atlas. These are intended to make available material relevant to published atlas fascicles. This volume accompanies Irish Historic Towns Atlas, no. 26, Dublin, part III, 1756 to 1847 (2014) by Rob Goodbody. It presents and examines extracts from the largescale Ordnance Survey town plan for Dublin city (1847), which was a crucial cartographic resource in the fascicle.
Dublin 1847: city of the Ordnance Survey is a joint publication between the Royal Irish Academy and Dublin City Council. The author and editors are grateful to Frances McGee, Hazel Menton, Honora Faul and Paul Ferguson for advice with regard to the large-scale town plan and to Andrew Bonar Law for his generosity with regard to illustrations.
Anngret Simms, H.B. Clarke, Raymond Gillespie, Jacinta Prunty Editors, Irish Historic Towns Atlas, Royal Irish Academy
FOREWORD
I n any major European cartographic operation two contrary pressures can generally be identified: economy keeps regional maps small; topography makes urban maps large; the obvious result is for towns to be mapped at a larger scale than the surrounding rural areas. It was not therefore unexpected when the Ordnance Survey was preparing for its Irish commitment in 1824 that the director, Thomas Colby, should suggest mapping towns at double the six-inch or 1:10,560 scale recommended for the country as a whole. Once the new survey had begun there was further discussion about what urban scale would suit the government s official valuators for whom all the Survey s non- military Irish maps were primarily intended. The chief valuator, Richard Griffith, wanted four feet to a mile, and it was Colby who suggested increasing this to five feet, which at exactly ten times larger than the six-inch would make it easier to use the Ordnance Survey s plotting instruments. In due course Colby s view prevailed. Plans of this unwieldy size were of little interest to the ordnance establishment, and they seldom figure in departmental correspondence. Archivally speaking, urban mapping remained a second-class citizen in the government s cartographic community for some time to come, and Dr Frank Cullen must be congratulated on unearthing a number of new facts about the coverage of Dublin in this series.
The publishing of these and other Irish Ordnance Survey maps in the 1830s and early 1840s was a responsibility not of the Board of Ordnance in London but of the lord lieutenant and his government in Dublin. Their belief, judging by the course of events, was that the nation s capital city deserved its own all-purpose large-scale map, whatever might happen in other towns. Clearly such a map should be made generally available, although the Survey took care to test public opinion by first publishing just one of its thirty-three constituent sheets as an experiment. Binding this sheet in the same volume as the six-inch survey of County Dublin (1844) was a magnified equivalent of the marginal inset town plans familiar in early private provincial and county maps.
To what extent and by what means Colby s officers adapted their survey methods to this demanding new framework is hard to say. For instance, how much precise observation was devoted to the plausible-looking lawns, flower-beds and garden paths of the Dublin plan? Here is a difficulty familiar to historical map-users: how to distinguish representational verisimilitude from conventional symbolism. For the most part the Dublin map manages to avoid this problem, accommodating with apparent accuracy information that previous cartographers would not have tried to squeeze into a traditional urban format. Examples were the exact shapes of individual buildings, the divisions between adjacent houses, and the precise widths of streets. These improvements opened up their own possibilities. Expanded street widths made possible the inclusion of drains, sewers and water mains, as well as the numbering of houses. Less generalised outlines allowed the depiction of interior lay-outs in buildings of public importance, a spectacle that was to dominate the finished map. Elsewhere minor names and other verbal identifications - pump, weigh house, crane, ball court etc. - could be multiplied apparently without limit.
All these issues emerge from the introduction to Dr Cullen s book and from its numerous illustrations. His main text makes several further contributions. One, inspired by recent progress in Irish architectural studies, is to add a verbal component of walls, pillars, gateways and upper storeys to the Ordnance Survey s ground plans of public buildings. In the resulting three-dimensional word-picture, refreshingly, a value-judgement can sometimes be allowed its place. At the Richmond Female Penitentiary, for example, The massive seventeen-bay, three-storey, unrelenting facade advancing right to the edge of the street was designed with one effect in mind: to intimidate. No gravel walkways or shrubbery greet the incoming prisoner, just cold grey calp .
The author s widest appeal, however, will probably be in his analysis of the real-life uses to which the city s urban furniture was put. He is particularly informative on hospitals, prisons, orphanages and other institutions, but in the end we are given a balanced view of an increasingly public-spirited city still exhibiting well-marked regional contrasts of poverty and wealth. At the same time Dr Cullen s interpretation of the phrase in 1847 is unpedantically liberal. His temporal dimension appears in frequent reminders of the Victorian city s antecedents and their socio-economic effects - the Wide Streets Commission, the Act of Union, the Napoleonic wars, Catholic emancipation, the coming of the railways, and finally the famine and its associated population movements. Nor does the narrative stop precipitously at any particular year. Where a historical process continues after the 1840s - as with the development of port installations to the east of the city - we can follow its course at least as far as the next appropriate natural break.
One way to form an overall impression of this book is by reference to the twenty-two thematic headings in the topographical information section of the Royal Irish Academy s Irish Historic Towns Atlas . How many of these categories can be applied to the 1847 map and to Dr Cullen s commentary? The answer is most of them. Altogether he provides a well-balanced history of early nineteenth-century Dublin, grounded in topographical facts without being slavishly dependent on them, and written with sensitivity and enthusiasm. It is a pleasure to introduce his work.
J.H. A NDREWS
Consultant editor, Irish Historic Towns Atlas
EDITORIAL NOTE AND ABBREVIATIONS
T he Ordnance Survey town plan for Dublin comprises 33 separate sheets each 920 x 610 mm in size. The maps were produced at a scale of five foot to one mile (1:1056) and were publishe