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In the winter of 1729 – 1730 Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, was awarded the freedom of Dublin city by special grace. This was the highest honour the city could bestow on him.

The area around the mouth of the River Liffey was inhabited from at least Neolithic times by farmers and fishermen. The great arc of Dublin Bay offered an inviting harbour for sea-going vessels, although its sand banks, shallows, slob lands and treacherous currents proved an obstacle to larger shipping in reaching safe anchorage upriver. This image gallery explores the course Liffey as it runs through the city.

November's Manuscript of the Month is a letter from the Western Front celebrating Robert Downie, “a Victoria Cross Hero”, 1916. The letter is part of the Monica Roberts Collection, one of the most important World War 1 collections of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association and Archive held at Dublin City Library and Archive.

The Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection includes concert programmes, posters, flyers, correspondence, programme notes, recordings, soloists and conductor’ biographies and administrative documents. Access to the collection provides unparalleled insight into the processes involved in professional orchestra and event management from the turn of the twenty-first century through recession times in Dublin. Find out more and view some items from the Orchestra of St Cecilia Collection...Dublin City Library and Archive.

Listen to Liz D’Arcy talk about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Hear how she painstakingly removed sellotape, cleaned, repaired and strengthened these important maps.   Liz D'Arcy, Paperworks, Studio for Paper Conservation is qualified with an MA in Conservation of Fine Art on Paper. Liz is an accredited member of the 'Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic works in Ireland' (I.C.H.A.W.I) and a member of the 'Irish Professional Conservators and Restorers Association' (I.P.C.R.A).Between 1757- 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of the city, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today.  Its function was to provide “Wide and Convenient Streets” for Dublin and it had extensive powers to acquire property by compulsory purchase, develop new streets, demolish buildings and impose design standards on building lots which were sold to developers. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, which comprises maps, minute books and drawings. www.dublincityarchives.ieRead more about the conservation project and view Wide Street Commission map collection image gallery.Search and browse the Archive of the Wide Street Commission Maps online.Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps - TranscriptAudio only:Recorded at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 at Dublin City Archives' 'Living in Georgian Dublin' seminar. Part of Heritage Week 2016 programme.Dublin City Archives is grateful to the Heritage Council of Ireland for funding under the Heritage Management Project Scheme 2016 to conserve 23 Wide Street Commission Maps in 2016. Conservation NoticeIn order to reduce handling damage and to ensure the long term preservation of these fragile maps, all researchers are requested to view the digitised images in the first instance. High-Res versions can be provided on request. Viewing of original maps is strictly by appointment only: please apply to [email protected]. Please note: A minimum of 3 days notice is required to process your request and a maximum of 10 maps may be ordered per visit. 

The following is a transcript of Conserving Wide Street Commission Maps 1757-1849, a talk by Liz D'Arcy.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Liz D’Arcy talks about conserving the Wide Street Commission Maps. Between 1757 and 1851, the Wide Street Commission had a major impact on the development of Dublin, transforming it from a medieval city to the Dublin we know today. Dublin City Archives hold the Wide Street Commission Archives, comprising maps, minute books and architectural drawings. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 as part of the Dublin City Archives' Heritage Week programme.Ellen MurphyLadies and Gentleman, our next speaker is Liz Darcy and Liz is a very talented paper conservator with an MA in Conservation and fine art in paper and she runs her own company Paperwork Studios.  She is an accredited member of the Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works in Ireland and a member of the Irish Professional Conservators and Restoration Association.  She has worked on numerous heritage projects for a variety of different institutions – including Dublin City Archives and her talk today is going to provide an insight into the intricate work involved with the conservation of Wide Street Commission Maps.  Thank you.Liz DarcyThanks for that introduction.  I don’t really need to say anything else about myself. I think you’ve covered it all (laughs).  Just to say, as a paper conservator I specialise in ... well it’s self explanatory but only paper objects.  So my aim is to conserve and preserve anything paper based.  It’s not officially restoration because I’m not trying to make them look brand new, I’m just trying to stabilise them and preserve them.  So I work on anything from maps, like you’ll hear today, archives, documents, water colours, prints, drawings, to three dimensional card models.  I had the privilege last year of working on one of the original Proclamations which is actually in the exhibition downstairs here as well.  So it’s a varied job and I absolutely love it.So the maps that I’m speaking of today I’ve been conserving a selection of these maps almost every year for I would say maybe nearly ten years and they are the Wide Street Commission plans, all dated from 1757 to 1849, and I would take a selection of these maps per year.  I’ll show you the condition that they come to me in in a few minutes.  I conserve them, then they go back to Dublin City Archives and are placed in secure storage there.  They are also digitised so people can view them.What I’m going to do today is talk about six maps that I’ve very recently treated and they are in very, very poor condition.  Now these are part of another selection of maps but these are probably in the worst condition.  When they come to me they are all rolled up.  They’ve been rolled for years.  You know the oldest I think is 260 years old.So this is an example of how they arrive to me.  So really you can see from the image, if somebody wanted to come in and view that map it really couldn’t be touched.  It couldn’t be opened.  The thing about paper when it’s been rolled for a long time is it wants to stay rolled.  It’s called paper memory.  So even as you try to unroll it, it tends to roll back in and any tears that are present are going to tear further.So this is just before it was treated and it was just very, very gently unrolled for the photograph and it’s held down with weights there and it’s a good example of how they come to me to be treated.So as you can see this map, this is actually of Gloucester Street.  There’s no date on the map but it’s within that time period specified.  It’s extremely discoloured.  Has a lot of surface dirt.  The bottom two sections on the bottom left are actually separated completely from the map, I’ve just placed them beside each other for the photograph.  It’s very, very torn and there are some sections missing which over the years is bound to happen because they are very fragile, they’re being unrolled and rolled and handled and this damage is going to occur to a lot of these maps over the years as they are being used.  So the treatment is very similar to all the maps but it’s cleaned and in this image I have cleaned the left hand side and the right hand side hasn’t been cleaned yet.  So it just shows a good example of the difference between once I start cleaning and it starts to become clear what’s actually underneath all that dirt and it’s a nice process to go through.  It’s a nice process to start with because it’s very visual and you can see the maps cleaning up.  It’s obviously a very delicate process.  The maps are mainly pen and ink and body colour so a lot of those pigments would be sensitive to any kind of treatment or moisture.  In actual fact a lot of the colours have remained really strong on the maps and probably because they have been rolled so they haven’t been exposed to light too much so it’s lovely to see the colours actually brighten up under that dirt as you’re cleaning.So as you can see the cleaning process has started there.  Cleaning basically consists of very small pieces of white eraser and sometimes I would use a smoke sponge which is like a chemical sponge just to very gently lift the dirt off the surface and once all that dry cleaning has been done I then use damp cotton swabs and just swab the surface – I’ll have a few photos of that later – to lift off any kind of soluble dirt.  A lot of objects that I treat I can actually wash in a very large sink I have in my studio which surprises a lot of people but it’s very similar to kind of washing your clothes, the dirt washes out and I check everything beforehand, check nothing is soluble.  A lot of times the pigments don’t wash out and the soluble dirt washes out but these are actually very, very sensitive to moisture so the furthest I can go with wet treatment is just to swab them with cotton swabs and that just very gently lifts the dirt off and actually in this photo this has just been dry cleaned so it hasn’t been swabbed yet so it will actually clean up a little bit more.This is an image of the tear repairs treatment to this map and I suppose a lot of you will have come across archives and documents that have been repaired with Sellotape which is really damaging to paper.  So what I use, what paper conservators use mostly, is Japanese paper to sit over the tears and that is adhered with wheat starch paste which I make up fresh before each treatment and this method is very complementary to paper. I try and pick a Japanese paper of similar weight to the original paper and it has very long fibre so it bonds really nicely and repairs the tears, helps them sit back together, and it’s also, most importantly, all reversible and it doesn’t age badly.  There is no damage going to occur to the paper as it ages as these tear repairs are on the reverse of the paper.So that’s a small corner of tear repairs on the reverse of the map and this is the reverse of the map and all the tear repairs that were done.  You can see on the right hand corner there’s kind of larger pieces, larger strips, of Japanese paper and that was to reattach those two sections that had become separate from the map, so slightly larger just to hold them all together.  And, on the right hand side, I don’ t know if you can see, the large piece of white paper is an infill, sorry there are two pieces of white Japanese paper, so these were the sections that were missing. So what I’ve done is placed a piece of Japanese paper on the reverse, then turned it around and basically trimmed some more Japanese paper to fit exactly into the space that was missing and this makes it much, much stronger.  So there is no danger, if someone picks that map up, of tears going any further in these areas of loss.And then this is the after photo, so this is after treatment, and it’s placed then into a Mylar sleeve.  So this looks like a plastic ... like a poly pocket as such ... it’s actually inert polyester and it actually helps preserve the paper so when they are stored in Dublin City Archives, in their strong room, they are all placed in these Mylar sleeves.  So you can see through the Mylar sleeve to see what’s in it but also the map can be picked up by using the Mylar sleeve so it’s not being handled directly.  So if someone did actually want to see the actual map rather than the digitised image it can be handled without touching it, you can turn it around, see the reverse, see the front and there’s nothing in these sleeves, in these Mylar sleeves, that will cause any damage to paper.  In the normal plastic sleeves there are gases and acids that actually migrate from the sleeves into the paper and will cause them to degrade over time whereas this will actually help preserve it.  So it looks identical to plastic but it’s not, it actually helps preserve it.And then just to sum up, this is the before treatment and then the after treatment in one image.  So you can actually see the bottom left, the two pieces that were separate are still slightly darker than the rest of the map.  They were both cleaned to the same extent but because they were exposed to the air because they were looser they had slightly more ingrained dirt in them.  And also you can see the areas that have been infilled, the areas that were lost.  I’ve left them a neutral off-white colour because again it’s conservation as opposed to restoration, so I’m not trying to hide any areas that were previously lost, you know not trying to make it look new, it’s basically to stabilise it all so that it can be handled and viewed and it’s back in a strong stable condition.  It’s also been pressed after it’s been cleaned and repaired and infilled.  It’s pressed which flattens it out and it can be left pressing for several weeks, if necessary, which removes that memory in the paper of it wanting to roll back up so then it can be stored flat and viewed.  So that was the first map that I treated.The second of six, just in this section, again this is how it came into me, this is before treatment.  So the top is as it was rolled up.  It had been stored rolled up for a long time and this map is of the area of Trinity College and College Green and it’s dated 1784 and there was an inscription on the map "Surveyed by Thomas Sherrard, 1784".  Also on the right hand side, on the front of the map, if you can see in the image, it had a list of each property and who lived in the property.  So very, very useful for researchers I’m sure who are researching this time period and the properties.This is a good example on the image of the reverse, on the lower right you can see someone had attached Sellotape to this map.  Now, it is damaging to paper but at the same time it kept the pieces together so you know they stayed together and then could be treated by me at a later stage, so that was one benefit but if the Sellotape had stayed on the paper it actually can cause it to degrade over time and can cause more damage to the paper bonds and the paper then just becomes more fragile in that area.  Also, as you’ve probably seen in old pieces of Sellotape, on old documents, it discolours very badly and it becomes a very orange/brown colour on paper and that becomes ingrained in the paper and it’s really, really difficult, almost impossible, to remove that staining.  So just a word of warning which you probably all know already, don’t use Sellotape on anything important.So the treatment of this map; this is the swabbing, damp swabbing, and you can just see the dirt that’s come off the map onto that cotton swab.  It’s not a very nice picture but necessary.  So before the swabbing this again was dry cleaned, surface cleaned, with various types of erasers and sponges to remove the surface dirt from the surface of the paper.  After that it was treated with water and damp cotton swabs to lift off the remaining soluble dirt on the paper and then tear repairs – this is the reverse of the paper – and you can again see the Japanese paper tear repairs that have all been cut or torn to size to fit over the tears exactly and the damaged section on the right hand side of this image has slightly thicker Japanese paper just to hold it all together.  And then this is the before and after.  In the before picture, which I forgot to mention actually, you can see the right hand side of the map has very, very heavy surface dirt and again that was the end that was exposed when it was rolled up, so that tended to get dirtier than the rest.  The rest was slightly protected by the fact that it was rolled.  But the very, very heavy ingrained dirt all settles on the exposed piece which was on right hand side.  So it cleaned up really nicely.  I think particularly the lower part of the image where you couldn’t really see the streets as well have cleaned up so it can be viewed and examined.  The areas that were missing have been infilled, tears repaired and again this was pressed and it then went into the Mylar sleeve for storage in Dublin City Archives and would be photographed as well so it could be viewed digitally.  So that was the second map.This is the third map that I treated.  So the one advantage of this map, if you could call it that, was it didn’t have as much surface dirt as the previous maps but you can see it was very, very badly torn – really, really fragile.  Even unrolling it to view it, when I first picked them up, was very difficult.  This is a map of Townsend Street from 1802.  An inscription on the reverse read ‘Fleet Market, year 1802’ as a description of the map and also on this map, on the right hand side you can see on the image of the front was a list of the properties and their prices so again probably very valuable to someone researching this area.  But as it was before treatment it couldn’t be handled at all.  In fact, the tears running into the centre, if they tore any further it would have been in even more separate sections than it was already.  The image of the front on the lower left, you can see the top left and the left side, both sections had separated completely.  They were separate from the main piece of the map and, as you can see, there are a huge amount of large tears running into the centre of the map – so very, very fragile.  So again this was very gently relaxed out so I could get to work on it and then it was surface cleaned on the front and the reverse using different techniques, so all the surface dirt was removed, apart from the very ingrained dirt, and then the tears were repaired – similar to the previous maps.  These tears were quite extensive so I did some work on the lightbox for some of this map and the lightbox really just allows me to see through the map, so if tears on a piece of paper are very old they tend to not line up very well together so to ensure that I was lining up every line or inscription or drawing on the map the lightbox allows me to see through it and I can very gently line everything up to the way that it should be and the picture on the right is the wheat starch paste that I make up to use as an adhesive with the Japanese paper.  A lot of techniques in paper conservation come from Japan because that’s where it originated so you’ve heard me talk about Japanese paper, the wheat starch paste is Japanese, the brushes I use are Japanese.  They really are the masters of paper conservation so conservators in the rest of the world would tend to follow their techniques, you know they are absolute perfectionists so great conservators to follow.  So that was the tear repairs, letting them settle.Again, another image of tear repairs drying.  So the picture on the left is because some of these tears are so long and they’ve been torn for so long as well they needed to pressed gently so they have been repaired on the reverse and then these weights are placed on top of them just to ensure that they flatten down nicely and line up together nicely and then the image on the right is all the tear repairs and the infills on the reverse of this map.  You can see the Japanese paper extends out beyond the original border of the map, so this is very much during treatment.  These repairs are then trimmed at the edges but just to ensure it is only the Japanese paper that’s trimmed, it’s never the original paper of the map (laughter).  You know we keep every single ... as you can see from that image on the left hand side, that’s before it has been trimmed, every small little piece that’s sticking out is kept just to ensure I am keeping every original section of the map.  So the Japanese paper is then trimmed at the edges and then each map is pressed, as I’ve mentioned previously, and another Japanese technique is used for this.  We use a dahlia sprayer which is just a very, very light mist.  We mist and humidify the paper and just let it very gently relax out then it’s placed between boards and weights are placed on top of it and it can press anything from a day to a few weeks just to flatten it all out nicely and, as I mentioned, remove that paper memory so it doesn’t want to roll back up.  So this is the before and after images and you can see where it’s been infilled.  Again, I haven’t tried to hide these areas but it’s all back in a stable condition.  All the tears have been repaired.  It’s back as one piece and again any treatments that were used will help preserve it.  None of these treatments will actually damage the paper, so then it went back to Dublin City Archives in this condition.The next one is a map of Fleet Street and Bank of Ireland.  No I don’t have any exact date on this one but this is as it was before treatment.  This one, unlike the previous ones, has very bad mould damage so at some stage this had come in contact with moisture and a damp atmosphere and it had a lot of mould on it.  So I don’t know if you can see, there’s kind of dark spots running across the lower centre, these are all mould spots, so if this had been left without treatment the mould can eventually just eat into the pigments and the paper and can cause literally holes to occur in the paper.  It literally eats right through it so it was very important, as well as cleaning and repairing, to remove all the mould spores from this map.  So it was surface cleaned very, very gently because it was very soft because of the moisture damage so the surface of this map was a lot softer than the previous maps, as with them all, but a little bit extra, I had to treat it very, very gently when surface cleaning to ensure that I wasn’t removing any of the pigments or affecting the surface of the paper.  So it was very gently surface cleaned and then once I’d ensured it was cleaned and all the mould had been removed it was, again, repaired with Japanese paper.  The areas of loss were infilled.  So this is an image of the front and the reverse during the tear repair and infill treatment and then this is it after treatment.  Again, it was pressed once it had been cleaned and repaired and stabilised.  So you can see the difference between before and after, that it’s nice and flat.  You can still see the staining that was left, that was caused by the mould damage, that was ingrained right through from front to back of the paper, so I went as far as I could with treatment but obviously I don’t want to damage the paper at all but most importantly all the mould spores were completely removed and the fact that this was going back into a dry stable environment where the temperature is being monitored would help ensure that no other mould spores were going to grow and no further damage was going to occur.  The paper was still quite soft so it still has to be handled very carefully.  But, again, it was placed in a Mylar sleeve so it doesn’t need to be touched or handled directly.  It would be protected in the Mylar sleeve in Dublin City Archives when people need to view it.And this is a fifth map that I treated in this section and this is Hawkins Street, Townsend Street, from 1800.  Again, this is by Thomas Sherrard.  The inscription on the lower right, on the front ‘by Thomas Sherrard, 1800’ and this slightly differed from the others in that it was paper attached to canvas with edge tapes around it and you can see the reverse was extremely dirty – very, very heavy surface dirt.  And again, much heavier surface dirt in the section that was rolled to the outside and was exposed to the air.  So the thing about canvas backings is that they attract a huge amount of dirt to the paper because of the open structure of the canvas, so it’s usually unless it’s of inherent importance to the paper it’s usually removed as a way of getting to the back and then the backing is replaced with a paper backing which doesn’t attract as much dirt and the edge tapes were removed.  In fact, they were almost falling off it anyway, they had all become loose as well.  And another interesting thing about this is you can see hopefully the holes in it, this wasn’t insect damage, it just seems it was poor handling at some stage.  I don’t know what was done to it but all these large holes running through it occurred at some stage or other during its lifetime, so these were causing it to be generally weak as well – the structure of the paper wasn’t as strong because of these holes.  So again this was surface cleaned and this is just an image of during treatment, so the right hand side has been cleaned.  The left hand side still has the surface dirt on it, so you can see that it was cleaning up nicely and it cleaned up very well.  So the top images are the before treatment and the bottom images are the after treatment.  So one aspect of the canvas backing was it had one inscription on it, so I cleaned that and kept it so it’s stored with the map, the inscription reads ‘Dublin Society Maps, 140 Fleet Market, year ...’ – the year has degraded off it so the  year is not on it but we know it’s 1800.  So that inscription from the canvas is retained with the map and in actual fact the original canvas backing was handed back to Ellen in the Archives in case they wanted to keep it with the original map and the edge tapes were also handed back.  So again this was cleaned, repaired, the holes were infilled which you can see from the image on the left – they are slightly lighter than the original paper.  It was pressed to flatten it and it was lined with a full sheet of Japanese paper, so this replaces the canvass that was on it and it’s a nice clean way of strengthening the paper as opposed to the original canvas.  So it was handed back in a nice clean re-lined condition.The final map which I’ll speak about is ... this is quite a long map.  It was 900mm – 90cm long and this is of Sackville, Gardiner, Temple Street, Summerhill area and an inscription on the reverse read ‘Summerhill’.  This was quite unusual in that it consisted of layers of paper attached to together.  There is maybe 3-4 layers of paper and I’m presuming this was done originally but it’s quite hard to tell.  So I didn’t want to remove any of the layers but a lot of them were delaminating and sections were missing.  So once it had been cleaned, which again was quite a tough job because it was very, very heavy surface dirt and this is an image of the cleaning.  So the top left is a cleaning test patch, so this is me initially just cleaning to see how much dirt is going to come off and you could actually see through the grey dirt a nice green and red colour coming through so I knew it would clean up quite nicely.  The bottom image is the reverse of the map and this is the second cleaning process which is swabbing with damp swabs where I just place a piece of blotter beneath the sections, swab it, and you can see the dirt that’s come off onto the blotter and the swab and the blotter underneath the map.  I was just very, very soluble dirt coming off this map so it was quite a long process to remove all the dirt from this map and then, as I said, there were layers of paper so I wanted to re-attach all those layers back together so it was a matter of lifting some sections that were loose and pasting with wheat starch paste through the layers from front to back before then executing the tear repairs which you can see on the reverse in this image and also one area of infill to strengthen up the map.  I didn’t infill the pieces that are missing at the top and bottom edge because the paper was very, very heavy and there was nothing to attach the infill to so I left them as they were.  So again, this is the before and after images.  So you can see how heavy that surface dirt was on that map.  It was really discoloured – very, very hard to see and it cleaned up very, very nicely.  I would have liked to have gotten it cleaner but that was as far as I could go with the treatment but, again, all the images are visible, all the inscriptions are visible, so it could be examined.  As with the other maps, it was also pressed to flatten it and then placed in the Mylar sleeve for storage and they all were obviously stored flat as opposed to rolled so that no further damage would occur.  So that’s the final map I’m going to talk about.Just as a little segueway, something which made this job a little bit more exciting was that the RTÉ show Nationwide contacted me to ask could they film me working, whatever project I had coming up or something I found interesting, so I suggested this project and contacted Ellen and Mary in the Archive and checked it was okay with them and they very kindly agreed that Nationwide could film the process of the conservation of these maps.  So it was a little bit of added pressure but (laughter) it was also exciting I suppose to work along the way and Ellen was brilliant, she filmed with me when I was picking the maps up and dropping them off and did some interviews.  You can see her in the top right corner there.  And they also came out to the studio during the process and filmed me working on some of the maps as well so that made it more exciting even though I thoroughly enjoy working on them anyway but it was a little bit added extra.So that’s basically the process from start to finish.  You know, as I said, I work on several of these most years and it’s a job I really enjoy doing, particularly I think being originally from Dublin, living in Wicklow now also.  But being originally from Dublin it’s interesting to see the maps and how the streets were planned and it’s interesting or it’s a privilege I suppose to be able to help make them stable and secure and accessible as well.  So I will leave it at that, thanks for listening. (Applause) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The following is a transcript of Restoration of No. 19 North Great George's Street, a talk by Harold Clarke.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Harold Clarke gives a charming account of restoring the beautiful Georgian building, number 19 North Great George's Street. Hear about the challenges Harold faced during his faithful restoration of the house and the delightful features he uncovered, most particularly its beautiful decorative plasterwork. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Hall on 24 August 2016 as part of the Dublin City Archives' Heritage Week programme. My boarding school was one of the Georgian distinguished buildings in Dublin and my university had a collection of the best Georgian buildings in Dublin.  Not that Georgian necessarily means comfort (laughter).  I would give my school probably 3½ out of 10.  I would give my university perhaps 5 out of 10.  After college I went to live in a Regency villa in Killiney, called Ballinclea House, which had been built by a branch of the Talbot family of Malahide, the Power Talbots, and the neighbours would tell me that the most distinguished thing that happened in the house was that King George and Queen Mary stopped for afternoon tea there on their way from Leopardstown.  So it’s not surprising with that background that I thought of living in a Georgian house when it came to the period in life when I would have a house of my own.  So one day at lunch time I was walking through Easons, as one does, and I met my friend Brian Molloy – also from Roscommon.  Brian knew everything about Georgian Dublin.  He had his ear close to the ground.  He knew what houses were available, who lived in them, etc.  So he told me that a house in North Great George’s Street – which I had never heard of before – had become available and he thought that I might find it possible to buy it.So there and then we went to see it, No. 19.  That’s a later photograph of it.  It was slightly more derelict looking when I went that day.  It had a dangerous building order on it.  In that time all the doors in North Great George’s Street were open which was the sign of a tenement street.  It was beginning to show 180 years of dereliction but there were good things about it, there were no tenants and it was a lovely house.  The bowed back was a particular feature of the house where the house projected beyond its neighbours.  That’s as it was in 1967.  The roof was pretty dangerous and that had to be replaced.  Within the house the only lavatory in the building was on the second floor and in due course it had leaked over the years and brought down the drawing room ceiling underneath.  The partitions divided up each room in the house and each separate apartment had its own coal box on the landings.  The top floor was pretty wet except that there were so many layers of linoleum that the water didn’t seep through so that protected it.  That was a view of the drawing room on the first floor.  Another view of the drawing room.  And that was the front hall.  The front hall interestingly had two pictures which were probably almost as valuable as the house and the lady who sold me the house left me the pictures.  They were two dog paintings by George Armfield and they were still there at the end of my day in the house.After 3 days I purchased the house, thanks to the Bank of Ireland who lent me the money and that was about it.  I hate to say it in this room but Dublin Corporation told me that they couldn’t see their way to giving me a grant because "the house wasn’t suitable for the housing of the working classes", to use their wording.  I did get a grant of £140 from the Department of Local Government.  Fortunately, I had among my friends a sensitive architect called Austin Dunphy who came to inspect the house and he gave the all-clear that I could develop the house.  One of the biggest jobs in the building was scraping back the plaster ceilings.  As you can see there, that’s a frieze in the dining room which is completely coated with years and years and years of white wash, so all we could do... probably now, one could remove that chemically but all one could do at that time was to scrape it back – as was the fact with the ceilings on the drawing room floors where they were quite decorated ceilings.I was very fortunate that great groups of my friends would come along each weekend and help me with this work of scraping back the ceilings and we had work parties – that’s a tea break in one of the work parties.  Interestingly, in that photograph you see where the outline of the original mantelpiece was which had been replaced by the Victorians with a marble mantelpiece.  Other views of scraping the ceiling – Desiree Shortt, Peter Munro and myself.  That is the dome at the top of the staircase.  In 19 North Great George’s Street the staircase runs parallel to the street, in other words its right angles to the inner hall – to the front hall – and it was quite a job.  We had to lift up the dome and reseat it and it was one of the major jobs and one of the first jobs to keep the rain out of that part of the building.  That’s the drawing room as completed because, so far as possible, I went for the original colours and when we took down all the layers of wallpaper we discovered that sort of grass green on the walls and green and pink on the ceilings so we were able to copy that and you get a view of the ceiling there that I’ll talk about in a moment.It was a fairly lonely job discovering about the history of the house.  Con Curran, C.P. Curran’s Dublin Decorative Plasterwork was published the year before I bought the house but there is no mention in his book of 19 North Great George’s Street. I think of Con Curran when I hear Daniel O’Donnell on the radio in his adverts saying ‘most people like my music, the rest don’t know what they’ve missed’ (laughter).  Con Curran liked Georgian ceilings but he didn’t know about No. 19.  The gap in information has since been replaced by Conor Lucey’s magisterial book on Michael Stapleton and of course on the Penguin guide, so it’s much easier to get information now.And I’m going to quote from Conor Lucey’s book because it expresses better than I can in my own words what was discovered about the creation of the house and the decoration.  He says:“In March 1787 John Prendergast, a bricklayer, in partnership with Edward Archdall took leave on the sites (that’s of 19 and 20 North Great George’s Street).  Work was completed in 1789.  Brian Bolger, a contemporary Dublin Quantity Surveyor in 1790 measured the two drawing room ceilings for painting, including the picking out in fancy colours (as you see) at 19 following the decoration of the house by Stapleton.”He goes on:“Of the two houses (19 and 20), No. 19 is unquestionably the more elegantly detailed and was described as ‘in the occupation of Edward Archdall’ in 1790.  Built on a narrow plot of some 20 feet in width, the building has a central stairwell lit by a large decorated oval skylight.  Drawings in the Stapleton Collection correspond to the executed plasterwork on the two first floor ceilings and represent Stapleton’s interpretation of the Wyattesque ornamental style.  The ceiling of the rear drawing room is the more accomplished design, featuring two attenuated lozenge shapes, one positioned inside the other and enriched with foliated wreaths similar to a design by Wyatt dated 1776 for Milton Abbey in Dorset and executed by Joseph Rose.  Although the central rosette is small in scale, there is a pleasing balance to the composition as a whole.  The frieze in this room featuring hounds, crescent moons and quivers is also found in the Diana drawing room at Belvedere House (up the street).  In the rear first floor room of 45 Merrion Square, built by Gustavus Hume in 1785, and in the small front and rear first floor rooms of No. 11 Parnell Square.  Additional drawings for the plasterwork of No. 19 North Great George’s Street include a full scale working drawing for a frieze inscribed ‘Ceiling Line’ similar to that executed throughout the entire stair hall and another frieze design featuring Putti holding laurel swags executed in the dining room on the ground floor.”The dining room had this frieze but it had no decorated ceiling which is interesting but it had a lovely sideboard alcove which I think was probably my favourite piece of plaster decoration in the house.  It was decorated with a motif of corn and grapes. That’s another picture of the drawing room.  That’s the sideboard alcove as it originally was in the dining room.  I used that alcove quite a lot.  My booklet which Ellen referred to on Georgian Dublin, I discovered there was no simple, cheap booklet on Georgian Dublin when I restored the house so I wrote this one which went through a couple of editions and I used that cover on one of the editions.  Interestingly the series, the Irish Heritage series, went on to become about 74 titles in the series including 7 on Dublin buildings and Dublin interests including Joyce’s Dublin and one on this building, the City Hall.  I must have had some foresight also because I did a booklet on St Patrick’s College Maynooth and the Pontifical Irish College in Rome (laughter).Residents in the street: we did some research.  Sir Samuel Ferguson lived next door to us.  Had lived next door to us in No. 20.  Isaac Butt, the leader of the Irish Party, lived in the street. Mahaffy of course lived in No. 38.  Arthur Guinness was in No. 43 when he was Butler for the Archbishop of Cashel.  And in my house, Mr Archdall is mentioned in the Lucey reference there was the original resident but shortly thereafter the house was inhabited by the Kings of County Roscommon.  The Kings were a quite extraordinarily acquisitive family in North Roscommon.  They dated back to 1603 when the town of Boyle was granted to Sir John King and after that they spread across the county to the wonderful Rockingham House near Boyle, the Nash designed house – sadly destroyed by fire later, that was the King Hammonds, to Kilronan Castle where the King Tenisons lived.  The King house in Boyle itself and my family of Kings came from a house called Charlestown in the village of Jamestown which was on the border of Roscommon and Leitrim.In the 60s and 70s there was a great character in Dublin known as the ‘Pope’ O’Mahony.  I never heard any other Christian name for him, he was always known as the ‘Pope’ but the ‘Pope’ knew everything about every Anglo Irish family that ever was and when I told him I had bought a house which had been owned by the Kings he said “Oh the Kings could travel from their house in Kilronan Castle to their estate in Mitchelstown in Cork without ever taking their eyes of King's land” (laughter), a little of an exaggeration I think but you get the message.Next to the Kings was a very interesting family, the Curtis family.  The Curtis father was a lawyer but his son is the interesting one, Robert Curtis.  Robert was the first Catholic scholar in Trinity College.  Being a scholar in Trinity College is probably you know, something you do after you are in college for some time and you sit the exam and it is announced on Trinity Monday if you have achieved the scholarship.  If you become a scholar you get some nonsensical rewards like playing marbles on the chapel steps (laughter) but you also get practical things like free tuition, free commons, free rooms, for the rest of your time in Trinity, so young Robert Curtis was a fairly privileged young man.  After Trinity he joined the Society of Jesus.  He was never ordained for health reasons but the interesting thing about his life was that he became a great and good friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins who had recently been appointed to the new university in Dublin.  He came to Dublin in 1884.  Hopkins hated Dublin.  He found it ‘a cheerless place’ he said.  But he writes to his mother about ‘his rock’ as he called the Curtis family and he wrote about the pleasure and the generosity he received from the Curtis’s in their house in Dublin.  He died of Typhoid five years after he arrived in Dublin and is buried in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin alongside Robert Curtis. After the Curtis came the Price family who were China dealers in South Great George’s Street.  After them it was a hotel for 10 years and after that a tenement.  Interesting to look at the history of the house, the landed gentry had it first, then the professional class, then the trading class, then a hotel.One of the great pleasures of living in the street was getting to know my neighbours, the neighbours who had lived there, and also the new residents who came shortly after me to restore the houses, people like Desiree Shortt, Willie and Ann Dillon, David Murray, Brendan and Josephine O’Connell – almost all of whom are there still keeping the flag flying in North Great George’s Street, so I am afraid I am the one who abandoned it.Some of the events in North Great George’s Street: the first was an unhappy one – in 1974 the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in Parnell Street.  I was on my way home from work and missed the bomb by a matter of seconds. I came into the street to a deathly silence which followed the bomb before people realised what carnage and what destruction had been done.  I went up to the house to find ... as I was saying earlier the bow of the house projected further than its neighbours so I went up to the house to find that all the windows in the back of the house had been blown in so we were having some people for dinner that night so the first thing was to clear up all the glass which was everywhere and closed the shutters and lived with the closed shutters for several months thereafter.  Interestingly, among our guests that night were John and Delphine Kelly, my friends.  John at the time was Attorney General so our dinner party was delayed because there was a Cabinet meeting – an emergency Cabinet meeting in the early evening – but we got down to dinner eventually.Next door to me on the north side was No. 18 which had been restored by Conor and Nuala Griffin and in due course they decided to put it on the market and it got not one bid at the auction, so I decided to save it I would buy the house and the Bank of Ireland came to my rescue again and lent me the money and I held it until somebody would come along to buy it and that somebody was a lecturer in English in Trinity College called David Norris and in his autobiography he tells a story of coming along to inspect the house and he said it was ‘love at first sight’ - that was the house not me.  (laughter)  He moved in at the end of 1978 and brought his dynamism to the street.  In 1979 the North Great George’s Street Preservation Society was founded and David was extremely active in that way and in all sorts of ways, including the restoration of No. 35 as the James Joyce Centre.I’ll show you ... oh I was going to show you that which was also the dining room alcove which the auctioneers used as the front, on the cover, for the auction when our contents were sold.  That is the alcove in the dining room when we were living there. That is the garden – half the original garden.  It was fairly derelict and it required a lot of work.  In the 1970s the Metropole Cinema and Ballroom was demolished to make way for British Home Stores which then became Penneys and in the demolition they took down on the first floor level, between the windows, there was a lion’s mask – a carved granite lion’s mask between each window – and a colleague of mine and myself persuaded the demolishers to give us the lion’s mask, not to put them in the dump truck and he brought his home to Drumcondra where he put it into his garden, where I’m sure it surprises people to this day and I brought mine home and built it into the wall of the garden – the wall next to David Norris.  I can’t remember the name of the carver, it’s the man who did a lot of the carvings in O’Connell Street.In 1987 it was the 200th anniversary of the granting of the lease to the house on 15 March 1987 and I gave the house a birthday party on that day and as a present I got the wrought iron gates in the garden made for the garden.Some further views in the house; that was the library, as we called it, which is the front drawing room.  The bookcase, as you can see, has a frieze over it which came from a house in County Limerick called Kilballyowen.  Kilballyowen was famous for a horse that had been bred there.  They had this huge library with an enormous frieze and a friend of mine who lived in a house called Lough Cutra in County Galway, in Gort, and I, we split the frieze.  A sort of decision of Solomon.  And the frieze is still in Lough Cutra and it is also still in North Great George’s Street so far as I know.  That’s the detail of the frieze.  I’m not sure whose plasterwork it was but he was obviously a man of some skill.  The photograph is taken from a magazine article about the house.  That’s another view of the library.  And that is the library ceiling which I painted in Dublin colours.  That’s the inner hall.  The stair carpet I left when I sold the house and I’m sure it’s still there.  That’s another view of the inner hall.  In the house, when finished, there was the Garden Room which is shown there and the old kitchen in the front also in the basement and a toilet also in the basement.  On the main floor was the kitchen, just inside the hall door, and the dining room.  The two drawing rooms on the first floor.  Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor.  Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor.  One of the reasons why I’m showing you this is you see the alcove, there is a frieze over it and that also came from the demolition of the Capitol and the Metropole.  In the Capitol Cinema that was an over door, over the door into the main cinema and it was the other way up, so I put it into ... in fact there were two alcoves, I put them into the alcoves upside down as it were.  That’s another view of the Garden Room which was really a sort of sculpture gallery with a view out to the garden.Coming towards the end.  That’s the staircase, it’s 100 steps, we’re on the way down now.  The steps from the ground floor to the basement were granite but the other steps were very untiring which was one of the things about Georgian buildings, the steps and the stairs are always just about the right height that in fact you can walk up to the top of the house and not be exhausted (laughter).So on our way out there is the George Armfield, one of the two George Armfield paintings still there, as it was when I bought the house.  Over the inner door under layers and layers and layers of paint I discovered in the centre a pattern of two griffons made of either silver or pewter.  I had to restore them very carefully but I’m sure they are still there to be seen.So in conclusion, it was a great pleasure living in North Great George’s Street.  Being within seven minutes walk of work was pretty good and the feeling of being part of a community on a mission.  So some people, many people, say to me ‘Why did you leave it?’, I found it hard to articulate it.  It was a mission complete.  It was a very large house for two people and it was probably time for me to move on and do other things which I did.  I moved to an apartment for a number of years and then when I retired from full-time work I bought a hillside site of 3½ acres in County Wicklow where I created a garden, which in fact is open this week for Heritage Week, each morning, in aid of  my friend Andrew McElroy’s project in South India, in Tamil Nadu and I open the garden each year during the summer for him, as it were.  The views of the garden ... the deer are not real (laughter), they are bronze or something, and that’s the bridge over a pond in the garden and that’s the Japanese garden.So I’m there in County Wicklow in Avoca for 21 years now and perhaps time I moved on to some other project.  I was in North Great George’s Street for almost 20 years.  So some of my friends are inconsiderate enough to say that at age 83 there aren’t many options left open (laughter) but we’ll see.  I want to say thank you for Ellen for assisting me and for dealing with my slides and all the other bits and pieces which she digitised for me.Ellen: Thank you so much Harold for your wonderful talk and I’m sure we’d all agree that the before and after pictures are just absolutely stunning and they show how huge an undertaking it was.Harold: Thank you very much Ellen.  (Applause) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Harold Clarke's charming account of restoring the beautiful Georgian building, no. 19 North Great George's Street.

The following is the transcript of a talk given by Dublin City Council Historian in Residence Dr. Mary Muldowney and historian Catherine Holmes. It tells the story of the bombing of North Strand on the night of 30/31 May 1941. This special event which marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing was hosted by Charleville Mall Library on 31 May 2021.

The following is the transcript of a discussion on global climate action and the food we eat. What we eat, how we eat, and where we’re getting our food from can have a big impact on the environment.