Review: Merrion Square 250

Abstract

An exhibition of eighteenth-century maps and survey drawings, Merrion Square 250, at the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin, examined the formation of one of the city’s foremost urban spaces. An appraisal of the square, long regarded as the principal ornament of its Georgian past, the display complemented an ongoing revival of popular interest in the city’s historic fabric. Indeed, given that Dublin remains a city whose “everyday” urban character is intimately wedded to its early-modern streetscape, its Georgian squares remain central to its identity: the enclosed figure of Merrion Square is, in fact, a flagship public park, and the individual houses framing it constitute some of the city’s most distinguished office accommodations. Moreover, recent initiatives of the Dublin Civic Trust (Dublin Garden Squares Day), the Irish Architecture Foundation (one-third of the buildings open to the general public during the annual Open House event were built during the eighteenth century), and Fáilte Ireland, the national tourism development agency (September on the Square), confirm that “Georgian Dublin,” as both a trope and a material reality, is increasingly being made legible to, and mediated for, a broad social demographic.Established in 1976 as a charitable company, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) is the principal repository for records relating to Ireland’s historic built environment. Though its gallery is diminutive in area, and is suited only for small-scale displays, the IAA’s exhibit program has been consistently inventive and resourceful. Since moving in 2004 to its present home in the single-largest house on the square, which was completed in 1795, it has increasingly drawn upon the resources of other Irish institutions, as well as its own rich holdings. Merrion Square 250 represented the fruits of such an alliance, as the items on display were in the main from the Pembroke Estate papers held at the National Archives of Ireland.Merrion Square marks the formal boundary of a vast estate owned by generations of the aristocratic Fitzwilliam family. Accumulated and consolidated from the fourteenth century onward, it encompassed almost seven square miles of counties Dublin and Wicklow; a remarkable 4,373 acres in total (1,377 acres in southeast Dublin alone) and was thus considerably more expansive than the 500 acres of London’s celebrated Grosvenor Estate. The focal point of an exclusively residential grid, Merrion Square and its tributary streets were largely developed during the tenure of the sixth and seventh Viscounts Fitzwilliam of Merrion; in 1816 this considerable holding was inherited by George Augustus Herbert, eleventh Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and has consequently been known ever since as the Pembroke Estate. Recorded in Fitzwilliam rent rolls from 1752—the “250” moniker refers to 1762, the year in which building of the square proper was commenced—Merrion Square survives as an expression both of Dublin’s unprecedented expansion during the second half of the eighteenth century and of emerging capitalist modes of building production: by 1800 Dublin was the sixth-largest city in Europe and, after Amsterdam and Lisbon, its third-largest port city. At a local level it was conceived in response to a range of fortuitous conditions: a period of national economic prosperity; a dramatic rise in the city’s population; and the commercial success of classically inspired urban set pieces on other privately owned estates across Dublin.A single, and singular, architectural elevation aside—a design of 1745 for the town house of James FitzGerald, twentieth Earl of Kildare, by the German-born architect Richard Castle—Merrion Square 250 was predominantly a display of ink-and-watercolor maps prepared by the Dublin surveyor and cartographer Jonathan Barker (d. 1767) as a visual record for an absentee landlord (the Fitzwilliam family were resident in England from 1725, and their property affairs in Ireland were effectively managed by a succession of agents). Maps of the twin settlements of Ringsend and Irishtown (revealing distinctively formal and “organic” patterns of town planning) (Figure 1), and of the then mostly undeveloped lands of Booterstown and Simmonscourt (transformed into middle-class suburbs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), collectively redressed the largely overlooked suburban dimension to Dublin’s eighteenth-century expansion, and complemented what may be described as the “landscape turn” in recent architectural exhibitions.Merrion Square was the most ambitious residential enclave of its time in Dublin, and the genesis of its formal design, revealed through Barker’s plans and survey drawings of 1762–65, constituted an important thematic thread of the exhibition. In “A Map of Baggat-Rath and all its Subdenominations,” the figure of the eventual “square”—here of indeterminate proportions—is broadly hinted at in a series of tentative extensions to already established street patterns and geometries. The formal composition of the square itself is illustrated, in part only, in Barker’s “A Plan of Merrion Street and the adjacent Neighbourhood” of 1762, but, tellingly, also acts as an index of leaseholders for the apportioned building plots (Figure 2). More revealing still are two almost identical maps titled “A Plan of Merrion Square with the intended New Streets,” both of which illustrate the full extent of the proposed development in 1764/5 (Figure 3). Collectively, these designs reveal how far the Fitzwilliams’ architectural aspirations departed from eighteenth-century theorizing and grand manner planning, confirming instead what has recently described as the sixth Viscount’s “hard-nosed building philosophy.”1Comparisons with “enlightened” Georgian streetscape, such as Edinburgh’s New Town (laid out in 1767) are, perhaps, too pointed: the Fitzwilliam Estate was privately controlled (Dublin’s urban planning body, the Wide Streets Commissioners, did not have authority over private developments until 1790), and as a result, private interests were clearly paramount. Less a question of architecture with a capital “A,” then, Barker’s rudimentary designs illustrate how the Viscounts Fitzwilliam prioritized the economic potential of their real estate, privileging commercial gain over classical manners.Characterizing the square as “a bold new urban development,” the accompanying text panels generally avoided reiterating tired, and typically exaggerated, assessments of Merrion Square’s questionable architectural sophistication. Instead, they focused on presenting a candid, nonpartisan view of a defining moment in the modern city’s formation. A free public lecture series at the IAA complemented this approach, examining a wide range of topics pertinent to eighteenth-century domestic architecture and home life: from building culture and urban design to entertainment and hospitality. In so doing, Merrion Square 250 achieved an admirable and important balance between academic credibility and popular sentiment.