Nothing will shake the generalisation that Dublin is a Georgian city. The Georgian era made the city and the Georgian building style persisted long into the Victorian era, certainly past 1850. Nevertheless, the city can claim to be as much a Victorian creation as a Georgian one. For this, we can thank the spread of the suburbs.
The suburbs had hardly existed in 1800 when almost the entire population was contained within the ring of the two canals. The suburban population was barely 30,000 in 1831. Then came the railway, which encouraged coastal suburban development on the south side. Blackrock and Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) slowly began to assume their modern suburban status. Following the Great Famine, the city swelled with wretchedly poor people fleeing from the stricken countryside. This in turn accelerated the flight of the middle classes to the nine new townships.
The townships were independent local authority areas, complete with their own town halls, beyond the reach of Dublin Corporation, whose remit stopped at the canals. They were Rathmines & Rathgar, Pembroke, Blackrock, Kingstown, Dalkey, Killiney, Kilmainham, Drumcondra and Clontarf. The incentive to develop them was driven by a number of factors. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1840 was one. It made the Corporation more representative and less oligarchic. In place of the old series of nominating bodies, all of them exclusively Protestant, the Corporation was now elected by all rate-paying property owners. The measure had been part of a deal made between the Whig government in London and Daniel O’Connell. As a result of this measure, O’Connell became lord mayor of the city in the following year, the first Catholic to hold the office since 1688.
Another was Protestant anxiety. O’Connell’s mayoralty was an ill omen for a professional class that was still disproportionately Protestant and that feared a Catholic-dominated Corporation. Added to this was the knowledge that rates — local taxation to fund services — would be lower in the townships than in the city, whose need for cash to address its sundry infrastructural shortcomings would ensure that Corporation rates would be relatively high. It was an article of faith among the township developers that the Corporation was wasteful and spendthrift. In sum, the flight of the well-to-do from the city robbed it of its leading citizens, who now suited themselves in the self-governing suburban townships while turning their backs on the increasing squalor behind them, thus accomplishing a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The division of the classes is the big theme of Victorian Dublin. The poor remained in a decaying, hideously overcrowded centre, many living in conditions of deprivation without parallel in northern Europe. The moneyed middle classes — ever more the social leaders of the city now that the flight of the old aristocracy was almost complete— moved to the townships, but worked, shopped and enjoyed concerts and theatres in the city to which they otherwise made no material contribution. As the city housing situation, especially in the tenements, went from bad to worse, with no clear plan for wholesale slum clearance, the suburbs witnessed a dramatic expansion with the development of delightful red-brick areas like Ranelagh and Ballsbridge. Outlying villages were now swallowed up by the new developments, and the overall effect of this expansion was the creation of a stark binary class division. The continuing decay of the city and the development of lush suburbs were two sides of the one coin.
By 1891, the city population was just over 245,000 but that of the suburbs outside the Corporation area was already past 100,000. Those who could get out of town got out.
Having got out, of course, they needed to get back in for work and pleasure. In this regard, the development of the tramway system was crucial. The first commercial tram ran in Dublin in 1872, on a route from the city to Rathmines. The tramway system spread rapidly, soon overwhelming the primitive omnibus network that had preceded it. In 1891, the three existing companies were consolidated as the Dublin United Tramway Company and the DUTC ran the city’s first electric tram in 1896. The DUTC survived until 1945, bequeathing its much-loved ‘flying snail’ logo to its unloved successor CIÉ.
Complementing access to and from the suburbs was the suburban railway system. Lines operated by the principal mainline companies were gradually studded with suburban halts to serve commuters’ needs. The series of southside stations along the Dublin South Eastern line to Wexford still form the backbone of the modern DART service. For example, Sydney Parade in the heart of the Pembroke township was opened as a station in 1852, having previously been a halt.
The reformed Dublin Corporation performed prodigies, despite the cynical flight of the rich. Regulatory functions which had previously been chaotically dispersed among individual parishes and voluntary bodies were now subject to greater central control. The most impressive results were seen in areas like sanitation and public health, where the second half of the century brought major advances. The first medical health officer for the city was appointed in 1874 (Charles Cameron, who made old bones and died in office in 1920). A huge step forward took place with the completion of the Vartry waterworks in 1871. For the first time, it provided the city with a pure water supply at high pressure and was the envy of other, richer cities in Britain and abroad.
The chief promoter of this initiative was the chairman of the waterworks committee, Sir John Gray, whose statue deservedly stands in O’Connell Street. The Vartry’s retaining dam held 11 million cubic metres, which then flowed through a 4km long tunnel to a large open service reservoir at Stillorgan before delivering up to 85,000 cubic metres daily to the city.
Hand in hand with this major advance in the city’s infrastructure went the development of domestic plumbing systems and the city’s sewer system. A Royal Commission on the Sewerage and Drainage of Dublin reported in 1880. It built on a sewerage system that had been begun in 1870 and was to develop into the Main Drainage Scheme in 1892, not reaching its full extent until 1906.
No wonder the rates were high in the city. None of this came cheap. Rathmines township, almost manic in its suspicion of the Corporation, opted out of the Vartry water scheme on grounds of cost, attempting instead to draw potable water from the Grand Canal. Only in 1888 did it admit defeat. Likewise, Rathmines and Pembroke dragged their feet for more than twenty years — again, on grounds of cost — before connecting themselves to the main drainage scheme.
Still, the townships did live up to their promise. Their pleasant and beautiful suburbs are some of Dublin’s most attractive modern addresses. The final move from neo-Georgian to Victorian red brick came around the mid-century. In Pembroke, for instance, which was finally incorporated as a township in 1863,Waterloo Road and Upper Leeson Street were developed in imitation Georgian in the 1840s. But as areas adjacent were created — Clyde Road, Raglan Road and Morehampton Road—red brick came to assert itself beyond any challenge. Indeed, a walk southward along Morehampton Road reveals quite starkly where mock-Georgian ends and Victorian red brick begins.
The independent townships were eventually re-incorporated into the city. The northside ones, Drumcondra and Clontarf, lost their independence in 1900 and the rest— with the exception of Kingstown/Dún Laoghaire — in 1929.
