: Fergal Tobin
: A City Runs Through Them Dublin and its Twenty River Bridges
: Atlantic Books
: 9781838959364
: 1
: CHF 7.50
:
: Regional- und Ländergeschichte
: English
: 304
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
An original and fascinating history of Dublin that tells the story of the city through its bridges. Dublin started life on the south bank of the River Liffey and for six or seven centuries that is more or less where the town stayed. In all that time, there was only one bridge across the river. Then, suddenly, in the twenty years after 1670, three more bridges were thrown up and the north side was born. Within a century, Dublin was being talked of as one of the ten largest cities in the whole of Europe. Built over a span of a thousand years, the twenty bridges that now traverse the tidal section of the Liffey have each contributed to the city's development, as it pushed through the open fields north of the river and east towards the bay, so much so that it is possible to piece together Dublin's history by tracing their construction in chronological order. Starting with Church Street Bridge, Dublin's first, which dates back to the Vikings, and ending with Rosie Hackett Bridge, erected in 2014, Fergal Tobin charts the rise of Ireland's capital city as never before and reveals how, perhaps more than any other city in the world, it has been truly made by its bridges.

Fergal Tobin was a freelance writer and historian. His career was in publishing and he was president of the Federation of European Publishers in Brussels from 2010 to 2012. Under the pen name Richard Killeen he wrote several acclaimed works of Irish history, including Ireland inBrick and Stone: The Island's History and Its Buildings, The Historic Atlas of Dublin and The Concise History of Modern Ireland. His previous book, The Irish Difference, was chosen as a Book of the Year by the Irish Times. Fergal died in February 2023, just after he finished writing A City Runs Through Them.

INTRODUCTION


THERE ARE MANY ways of telling a city’s history. Few things that have happened have happened entirely by accident or chance. Most are deliberate, and there is hardly a human action more deliberate than throwing a bridge across water. That is especially so in cities with well-articulated quarters on either bank, as in Paris or London or, on a more modest scale, Dublin. There are rivers in cities like Edinburgh or Brussels that you might miss completely, so tucked away are they. There are cities like Turin or Vienna where the substantial part of the city is on one bank only. There are places with no rivers at all.

Dublin started life on the south bank of the Liffey, on the rising ground that runs up to Christ Church. That rising ground is in fact a geological ridge that runs east–west parallel to the river and offers strategic control over its tidal reaches. And for six or seven centuries, that is more or less where the town stayed, with just a nervous north-side suburb in nearby St Michan’s parish: Oxmantown. Until the 1660s Dublin was at first little more than a village, then a town of some little consequence, but still small as such places go, in comparative terms, and still hugging the area around that ridge of rising ground that runs east from Kilmainham to what is now the west end of Dame Street.

In all that time, there was only one bridge over the urban Liffey. There was no need for more, there being so little on the far side. Then suddenly, in the space of fewer than twenty years after 1670, three more bridges were thrown up and the north side was born. (There were actually four, but one was soon destroyed in a flood and not rebuilt.) A process was begun that might be described as northing and easting. As the modern city formed, it did so by twin impulses: developing what had hitherto been open fields north of the river while simultaneously – albeit gradually but inexorably – pushing east towards the bay.

The purpose of this book is to trace the process by looking at these various river crossings chronologically, in the order of their construction. I begin this book as I shall finish it, deficient in knowledge of civil engineering. So how these bridges were actually constructed and made safe is less my subject than the municipal and political motivation behind these structures and the effect that each one had on its hinterland on either side of the river. From this patchwork quilt I hope to construct an impressionistic history of the city. It can be little more than that, for you will learn little here of the far-flung suburbs, remote from the river. What you may learn, however, is how the musculature of the city developed and how it determined the shape and purpose of the modern urban space.

Every Dubliner knows about north-side–south-side jokes: well, without the bridges there wouldn’t be any. The contrary theme of east and west may seem less obvious but is, in my view, more potent sociologically, as I hope the following pages demonstrate. Without that process of northing and easting, for instance, there would be no trace of that postal district and state of mind known as Dublin 4, thelocus classicus of bourgeois amour propre – which would be an intolerable absence.

The book, therefore, does not follow the flow of the river from Islandbridge to the sea. Instead, it hops back and forth according to the construction dates of the bridges themselves. So this is jigsaw history: until all the awkward pieces have been properly placed, the overall picture remains unclear.

What is undeniable, though, is the extraordinary momentum that the bridges provided to the city’s sudden and precocious deve