House - 18th/19th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Georgian Dublin is generally associated with the northside squares and wide streets that were laid out in the latter half of the eighteenth century, yet the architectural historian Maurice Craig, writing in 1969, drew attention to a building in Dublin's south city that predates much of that celebrated building programme.
According to Craig's survey, pages 107 to 108, the structure dates from around 1725, placing it in the early Georgian period, before the Wide Streets Commissioners had begun reshaping the capital.
The date matters because 1725 puts the building in the reign of George I, at a moment when Dublin's merchant and professional classes were beginning to invest in brick townhouses of a distinctly new character. Early Georgian domestic architecture in Ireland typically features plain red or brown brick facades, relatively modest ornamentation compared to the grander terraces that came later, and a vertical proportioning of windows that reflects the influence of English pattern books circulating at the time. A building surviving from that decade in the south city would represent an unusually early example of the form in that part of Dublin, where much of the surviving Georgian fabric tends to date from the 1750s onward.
Craig's reference is brief, and the building does not appear to have attracted sustained scholarly attention beyond that citation. For anyone interested in early eighteenth-century Dublin, it is worth consulting Craig's 1969 volume, "Dublin 1660 to 1860", which remains a standard reference for the city's architectural history, to locate the precise address and any additional detail he provides in context. The south city encompasses a wide and varied area, so tracing the specific structure would require working from the original text. Those who do track it down should look at the proportions of the facade and the window arrangement as indicators of its age, since these features tend to survive even where later alterations have changed the interior or the shopfront below.