A meticulously re searched and substantial feature by Frederick O'Dwyer in the latest issue of the Irish Georgian Society's journal, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, examines the work of John Skipton Mulvany. An industrious and prolific Irish architect, Mulvany (1813-1870) is almost entirely forgotten today, despite the survival of so many buildings for which he was responsible; among the finest extant examples are Dublin's regrettably neglected Broadstone Railway Station, Athlone Railway Station, Galway Railway Station and the adjacent Great Southern Hotel, and Mount Anville in Co Dublin.
However, the single greatest concentration of Mulvany-designed structures can be found in the greater Dun Laoghaire area, the expansion of which coincided with the development of his own career. And if the architect responsible for giving the district much of its familiar appearance is now little appreciated, so too is a great deal of his work there. The abiding Irish preoccupation with Georgian design has been to the detriment of the period which immediately followed; while this country's architectural development during the 18th and early 19th centuries has been exhaustively studied, the same can not be said about the Victorian era.
The majority of architects who practised during the greater part of the 19th century have yet to receive much attention, even from academics. O'Dwyer's study of Mulvany is a rare and gratifying exception.
Inevitably, one consequence of this neglect is that Victorian architecture is insufficiently known or its merits appreciated. And this explains why a town such as Dun Laoghaire, which is almost entirely a 19thcentury creation, has been so badly assaulted by speculative developers over recent decades: interest in its preservation, based on knowledge of its positive attributes, has been sorely lacking.
Until the early 1800s, Dun Laoghaire was little more than a small fishing village. Two developments then changed both its appearance and character, the first of these being the construction of the harbour from 1815 onwards.
Six years later, George IV paid a visit to Ireland, departing from Dun Laoghaire, which was renamed Kingstown in his honour; on Queen's Road, near the Carlisle Pier, a granite obelisk topped by a crown and resting on four spheres marks the monarch's presence in the town. The creation of a substantial harbour meant Dun Laoghaire became one of the principal points of entry for visitors to Ireland and its character as a destination for large numbers of travellers was only enhanced by the arrival of the railways: the first line opened in this country, in 1834, ran between the town and central Dublin.
Dun Laoghaire's neo-classical granite railway station, which now operates as a restaurant, was designed in the 1830s by Mulvany, although it was only completed some 20 years later.
Another couple of social changes also assisted the rapid expansion of the town, these being the expansion of Dublin's suburbs and the establishment of mass public holidays. During the first half of the century, much of the capital's centre was abandoned to the poor and declined into slums as more affluent citizens preferred to move to newly-developed districts such as Dun Laoghaire. And like so much of the south Dublin coast - most notably Bray - the town also benefited from increasing numbers of people seeking rest and recreation beside the sea; from the very start, a large number of houses in Dun Laoghaire were built to be rented by holiday-makers.
But, like resorts such as Brighton on England's Sussex coast, the finest properties were intended for owner-occupiers, even if that occupation might only be for a few weeks of the year. One reason why Dun Laoghaire and indeed the entire seafront from Monkstown to Sandycove proved to be so immediately popular, aside from its advantageous proximity to Dublin, was the nature of the site, sloping from some distance back in a gentle but constant gradient to the seashore.
This permitted the arrangement of stepped terraces of houses, which is still such a feature of Dun Laoghaire, as it is of its sister town, Cobh (formerly Queenstown), and many other coastal resorts. Thanks to a combination of rising ground and considerate developers who avoided building too high too close to the shoreline, unimpeded views of the sea were available even to those living some distance away.
Dun Laoghaire offers abundant instances of this courtesy on the part of the original builders. In Belgrave Square, for example, the south side properties on the higher ground rise three storeys over their basements, with views across Dublin Bay from the upper floors. These houses rise above the two-storey terraced houses on the north side. All the porticoed old buildings occupying sites closest to the sea - Mulvany's railway station as well his Royal St George and Royal Irish Yacht Clubs - offer just a single storey above ground level on the road frontage precisely so that their roofs do not obstruct the sight lines behind.
The terraces of greater Dun Laoghaire are unquestionably the district's greatest architectural glory and the largest surviving example of Victorian housing in the country. Their construction began around 1830 and continued almost without a break for around 40 years until most of the finest sites in an area once occupied by a handful of villas and country houses had been densely covered. For contemporary urban planners, the terraces' character offers incontrovertible evidence that a large number of residential units can be successfully and attractively packed into a relatively small space, provided they conform to certain pre-established rules and that they share common features.
Terraced housing of this kind, despite operating within narrow design parameters, still remains popular, as the prices paid for any such properties coming on to the market demonstrate. In this instance, unity of form confers grace rather than blandness on the individual elements of the terrace and disruption to any one part fatally weakens the whole.
In Dun Laoghaire, that disruption began in 1974 with the demolition of the nine houses which made up Gresham Terrace, dating from the 1830s and therefore one of the first to have been built in the town. The line of properties was cleared to make way for the shopping centre which fronts on to George's Street; tellingly, whereas Gresham Terrace looked out to sea, its replacement prefers to ignore what is obviously the district's most arresting feature - the view across Dublin Bay.
For the past quarter century, one of the first sights greeting tourists who arrive in the port has been the windowless wall of the shopping centre's car-park, thereby offering incontrovertible proof of Ireland's visual illiteracy. To walk around the streets and terraces of Dun Laoghaire, Monkstown and Sandycove is to find abundant further instances of this sad truism. The best-preserved parts of the coastline include the wonderfully grandiose Longford Terrace - attributed by Frederick O'Dwyer to Mulvany - as well as Trafalgar Terrace and the delightful Brighton Vale, which is on the sea side of the railway line. But otherwise, there is scarcely a line of houses in the area which has not suffered from ill-considered redevelopment.