Page 25 - Gullivers

St. Stephen’s Green was being laid out and the present plan of the city centre
was taking shape, with Ormonde Quay, Capel Street, Mary Street, and Jervis Street being started and Essex Bridge built to link these with the older city south of the Liffey. Here, close to Dublin Castle, stood the Tholsel, the old corporation building that then housed the Royal Exchange. The castle itself – home to the Irish Lord Lieutenant, when in residence (which was not osten) – was slowly being changed, in line with contemporary taste, away from its original medieval design. These developments had already given Dublin a more modern appearance by the end of the seventeenth century, very much at odds with what survived of the fabric of the medieval city: both Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedrals, for instance, had houses built right up alongside them, sharing a wall with them, in what – to modern conservationist eyes - appears to smack of randomness,
if not actual vandalism.
In the opening decades of the eighteenth century, this modernisation of the
city continued, and Dublin began to acquire many of the buildings that still remain today. The Mansion House in Dawson Street was built in 1710 and became the residence of the Lord Mayor five years later; the old Custom House, designed by Thomas Burgh (the predecessor of James Gandon’s masterpiece on Custom House Quay) was erected close to Essex Bridge in 1707; and Burgh’s Old Library of Trinity College was built over the course of two decades between 1712 and 1733 (though the barrel-vaulted ceiling was added in the late-1850s). St. Anne’s church in Dawson Street, St. Werburgh’s, and St. Mary’s in Mary Street were all built or rebuilt during these years - as, of course, was Edward Lovett Pearce’s Parliament House.
I. Swist and Dublin 19