THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY IS IRELAND'S LEADING BODY OF EXPERTS IN THE SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The Royal Irish Academy/Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann champions research. We identify and recognise Ireland’s world class researchers. We support scholarship and promote awareness of how science and the humanities enrich our lives and benefit society. We believe that good research needs to be promoted, sustained and communicated. The Academy is run by a Council of its members. Membership is by election and considered the highest academic honour in Ireland.

Read more about the RIA

Dublin 1847: city of the Ordnance Survey

by  Frank Cullen
€ 15.00

Book Details

Published by Royal Irish Academy

February 2015

Paperback / softback

Number of pages: 108

ISBN: 9781908996350

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 Cullen 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.

The Irish Historic Towns Atlas is a research project of the Royal Irish Academy and is part of a wider European scheme. www.ihta.ie.

This book is also available on JSTOR. For more information, institutions can visit Books at JSTOR or contact participation@jstor.org.

You can buy the e-book here.

Solve our book cover jigsaw puzzle here.

About the authors

Frank Cullen

Frank Cullen is an editorial assistant with the Irish Historic Towns Atlas project in the Royal Irish Academy. He completed his PhD in history (Maynooth University, 2005) with a thesis entitled ‘Local government and the management of urban space: a comparative study of Belfast and Dublin, 1830–1922’. He is the author of Dublin 1847:city of the Ordnance Survey (2015).