History of Ireland in Maps and Dublin: Mapping the City – Chart toppers

The age of the internet is reshaping our mental processes in so many ways that it can be difficult to grasp. Take the relatively simple question of our functional relationship with our physical surroundings as interpreted through the medium of maps, which used to be physical objects stuffed in a bag or a glove compartment for occasional use. These apparently banal documents were rooted in a great cartographic tradition stretching back to the ancient world and forward through the scientific breakthroughs of the Enlightenment to the great imperial projects of the 18th and 19th centuries. These in turn were driven by a specific set of ideological objectives and cultural assumptions.

Now that the entire topography of the planet can be accessed by everyone instantaneously, through an app which offers to direct every step of your journey to your preferred destination, our relationship with the science (and art) of cartography has changed profoundly. We use maps more than ever before, which may help to explain the rising interest in the history and practice of their manufacture.

These two handsome new volumes set out to use that history to tell respectively the broader stories of Ireland and of Dublin.

Historian, illustrator and environmentalist Pat Liddy has produced many books about the capital, but turns his attention this time to the entire island. His History of Ireland in Maps traces its story over the course of 25,000 years, from the height of the last Ice Age to the rising sea levels of the 21st century. A reconstructed map from the 6th century BC by Hecatateus of Miletus shows neither Britain or Ireland existing in the ring of water surrounding Europe. Ptolemy did a little better, producing the first (highly inaccurate) map of Ireland in the wake of the Roman invasion of Britain.

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But many of the most informative of the early illustrations in the book are modern graphical representations of everything from the spread of the monasteries to the settlements of the Vikings. The book comes into its own with the arrival in the early 17th century of cartographer John Speed and his successors, charting the rise of the cities and the effects of successive plantations, but the book feels a little skimpy when it arrives at the revolutionary and post-independence eras. It is nonetheless a trove of fascinating insights and a good introductory visual retelling of this country’s history.

John Speed figures prominently in Dublin: Mapping the City, a more heavyweight but no less enjoyable production from geographer Joseph Brady and Trinity College Dublin map librarian Paul Ferguson, which uses maps to tell the story of the capital since the reign of the Stuarts (Viking, Norman and medieval Dublin were unmapped, and what we know about them comes from written accounts and archaeological evidence).

The 18th century saw the dawn of high-quality Dublin cartography, not least due to the arrival of John Rocque, whose sublime Exact Survey of the City and Suburbs of Dublin (1756) captured the Georgian metropolis when it was on the verge of rapid expansion eastward from the old medieval core. The establishment of the Wide Streets Commission a couple of years later would herald a new era of urban planning and a new sort of city centre that is still in large part recognisable to us today. Canals, railways and suburbs would follow over the course of the following century.

The physical development of Dublin is, of course, intertwined with parallel political landmarks – the 1798 rebellion, the Act of Union, Catholic Emancipation – which the authors acknowledge. And yet these maps and three-dimensional panoramas (the Google Earth and Street View of their day) remind us that in parallel with such developments the city continued its inexorable progress almost regardless, a living, breathing organism comprised of tens of thousands of individual lives and stories.

The leaders of the Easter Rising deliberately made the streets of Dublin the stage on which they would redirect the course of Irish history. But in the background Dublin moved on, albeit sluggishly at first and then with greater rapidity as the focus of suburban development shifted westward in the postwar years. Some of the most poignant later maps are blueprints for future developments, some of which never happened, and others, like the brutal destruction of streetscapes in the 1970s to allow for more cars, which unfortunately did. It is a complex story, told well by the authors with an expert use of well-produced maps and lucid accompanying text.