Town & Country launch and 'Mapping places, mapping people' lecture

Howard Clarke, MRIA, delivered his illustrated lecture on people in the Dublin Irish Historic Towns Atlases to a full house with a response by Dr Ruth McManus (Dublin City University). The session was opened by Pat Guiry, President of the Royal Irish Academy and chaired by Dr Michael Potterton (Maynooth University). In it, Clarke teased out the various sections of the atlas where people can be found in the population figures, remembered in street names and in topographic illustrations depicting civic scenes. 

Directly after the lecture, Town & country: perspectives from the Irish Historic Towns Atlas edited by Sarah Gearty and Michael Potterton was launched by Vanessa Harding, Emeritus Professor of London History at Birkbeck, University of London and chair of the Historic Towns Trust. 

Town & country, based on a seminar held in 2021 that examined the interconnection of towns and their hinterlands chronologically, is dedicated to the historical geographer and renowned cartographic historian, J.H. Andrews, who died in 2019. It includes Andrews’s seminal essay on the topographical development of the town of Kildare, from the first publication of the Irish atlas series in 1986, alongside essays on his life’s work and a bibliography of his extensive writings. The other contributors to the volume are H.B. Clarke, Frank Cullen, Mary Davies, Chris Dyer, Jim Galloway, Raymond Gillespie, Richard Haworth, Arnold Horner, Ruth Johnson, Colm Lennon, Keith Lilley, Ruth McManus, Margaret Murphy, Séamas Ó Maitiú, Michael Potterton, Brendan Scott and Anngret Simms. 

To purchase the book, please click here. 

The 2021 Town and Country seminar can be watched back here. 

All photos by John Ohle, 22 November 2023.