Irish Georgian architecture is recognisably a variation on what was the prevailing international style in the second half of the eighteenth century. One can observe common patterns, as well as marked differences of detail and materials, in cities as far apart as London, Bath, Edinburgh and Dublin. But all share a common architectural grammar, with variations in theme and detail dictated as much by the availability of local materials as anything else.
In Bath local honey-coloured stone, reminiscent of that in the Seine valley across the Channel, dominates. In Edinburgh, it is the massive granite facades of the New Town that impose themselves upon the eye; combined with Auld Reekie’s unforgiving climate, they also make these massive houses impossible to heat. In Ireland, Georgian facades are clothed in brick, the island being well provided in brickworks. The warm, russet-brown bricks so characteristic of Irish Georgian house-fronts, combined with their chaste rectilinear design, give the houses their peculiar blend of monumentality and domesticity.
When we think of Irish Georgian, we usually think of Dublin. But Dublin is only part of the story, for this local interpretation of the prevailing international style reached into many corners of the island. In urban terms, nowhere is this better observed than in Limerick.
Like so many Irish cities, Limerick was of Viking foundation, was later occupied by the kings of Thomond and later again by the Normans. Its urban charter dates from 1197. It is in three parts. The heart of the historic town is King’s Island, formed by the broad sweep of the Shannon to the west and a small channel, known as the Abbey river, which girdles the island to the east and then rejoins the main river. This historic core was called English town. To the south-east, and across the Abbey river, was Irish town, originally a suburb but later the location for some fine streets, many wider than the cramped and twisted thoroughfares of English town.
The area to the west of Irish town, between it and the Shannon, was open country in the mid-eighteenth century. It is now the centre of the modern city. This is due to the enterprise of the man who owned this land. He was Edmund Sexton Pery MP (1719–1806), who was Speaker of the Irish parliament from 1771 to 1785. In 1765, he asked Davis Ducart to plan a new town on this land. Ducart was an architect from Sardinia — Daviso du Arcort in the pre-anglicised version — who had established himself as a skilful practitioner of the Palladian style in Ireland. In Limerick, he designed the impressive courthouse in Irish town (1769).
Just as Edinburgh New Town was built adjacent to but separate from the historic core of the city, so it was in Limerick. Two things are striking about it. Ducart copied the prevailing Dublin Georgian style for his Limerick buildings and he laid the new town out on a rational rectangular grid plan, one of the very few examples of this kind of street pattern in Ireland. Instead of the medieval jumble of English town, this was a new kind of urbanity: the geometry of the Enlightenment. The whole area was named for its prime mover: Newtown Pery.
Its effect on contemporary sensibility can be measured from Fitzgerald and McGregor’s History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Limerick, published in 1827 when there were still people alive who could remember Newtown Pery as green fields. They note that an earlier writer of 1775 had reckoned 3,859 houses and 27 streets in the city. Now they estimated ‘near seventy streets beside innumerable lanes’ and 8,268 houses. The population had grown from an estimate of fewer than 30,000 in 1775 to 66,042 in the census of 1821 (admittedly not as reliable statistically as later censuses).
They rhapsodised this urban novelty.
The ground on which the New Town is built is rather elevated, and the soil in general gravelly and dry. The streets are spacious, cut each other at right angles, and are occupied by elegant houses and merchants’ stores constructed of brick and limestone, for which the neighbouring district supplies the finest materials. A more superb city-view can hardly be presented to the eye than the range of buildings from the New Bridge to the Crescent, a distance little short of an English mile... Shops tastefully laid out and richly furnished line these streets, while others diverge to right and left, which are chiefly occupied by the residences of the gentry.
For novelty it was, and even today it contrasts sharply with the general run of Irish streetscapes, characterised as they are more by irregularity and random individuality than by coherence. By contrast Newtown Pery, in the finest expression of Enlightenment principles, is all coherence and unity of purpose. Symbolically, Fitzgerald and McGregor note that ‘at night the streets of the New Town are splendidly lighted with gas, while those of the English Town are left with unaccountable negligence in total darkness, except where the brilliancy of some public house illumines the gloomy scene’.
The later history of Limerick has not always been happy, although it was a vigorous centre of trade and commerce in the nineteenth century. In more recent times, it has had the worst press of any Irish town and has a wretched reputation for gangland violence and drug-related crime. But Newtown Pery still stands as a symbol of rational possibility in brick and stone, one of the most impressive urban landscapes in Ireland.
Irish history is often imagined in terms of the nationalist imperative: the recovery of
‘our’ country from the strangers who invaded it long ago. But strangers, invaders and immigrants are the very currency of a dynamic country, and especially of port cities. Newtown Pery is not really Irish in the sense that it is not native — if by native we mean Gaelic, Catholic and rural, which all too often we were inclined to do — but it is decisively Irish in another sense. It was built in an Irish manner, an unmistakable variation upon an international theme, at the bidding of a wealthy local grandee. If you were dropped blindfold into Newtown Pery (or Merrion Square) you could not mistake them for anywhere else in the world. There are many ways of being Irish.
