Protestant Dublin, 1660–1760: Architecture and Iconography

Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 139e151

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Reviews Peter Barber, London: A History in Maps. London, The London Topographical Society in conjunction with the British Library, 2012, viii þ 380 pages, £30 hardcover. This is the book for the many people who were lucky enough to get to the British Library’s exhibition on London’s maps (November 2006eMarch 2007). Peter Barber, the head of the map collections at the library and the author of the volume under review, curated the exhibition, which was one of a what Stephen Daniels in this journal describes as a ‘series of searching exhibitions on the culture of cartography at the British Library’ (36: 4 (2010), p. 473) curated by library staff with Barber prominent among them. The London exhibition was the most visited British Library exhibition to that date, a testimony to the wide popular appeal of maps, but particularly to the wide public appetite for an exhibition about maps curated to the highest scholarly standards. The volume launched at the time of the exhibition, however, was not by the curator, but was Peter Whitfield’s London: a Life in Maps and the exhibition itself lacked a catalogue or even a handlist of captions. It is not to belittle Peter Whitfield’s book to say that the lack of a catalogue was a profound disappointment to many. The council of the London Topographical Society, to which society’s publications Peter Barber is a regular contributor with numerous short pieces on London’s maps and mapmakers, realised the need for a permanent record of the exhibition and took the initiative to publish all of the captions from the exhibition with every item illustrated in part or in whole. Making it a joint venture with British Library publications solved logistical questions of reproduction and rights, and the whole amply fulfils the society’s ‘hope that the volume will become a milestone in the representation of London’s growth and development, besides being appreciated as a beautiful volume’ (foreword). The wide public interest in maps proved by the exhibition means that the publishers can expect substantial sales and this is reflected in the book’s price: a mere £30 gets you 380 glossy pages whose large format means that full justice can be done to the images, faithfully and accurately reproduced. The price also, and crucially, gives the reader access to centuries of acquisitions by the library and decades of scholarship by the author, and this makes the book a delight to read. Readers will find something to capture their imagination whatever their interests. For the earliest period representations on coins and seals are included, and for the medieval period, maps proper are joined by images from illuminated manuscripts. Birds’ eye and other views share with maps the task of representing the early modern city. But what is really astonishing is the sheer variety of maps and plans which form the bulk of the images: among the many which I enjoyed are the plan of the boxes at an eighteenth-century London theatre (the King’s Theatre Pantheon) with their subscribers e the great and the good of Georgian London (pp. 98e99); the nineteenth-century plan of Kensal Green cemetery with elegant marginal drawings (p. 258); and ‘Hopson’s Handy Map of the

Crouch End Cricket Fields’, with its marginal advertisement for the ‘Celebrated “Resilient” spring handle bat’ (p. 301). It would be easy to be seduced by these maps and produce a book of maps of which the whole was not really more than the sum of the parts: fascinating to dip in to but not much more. The really impressive thing about this collection is that the whole is much more than the sum of the parts and the book really does what its title suggests: narrates a history of London through the maps. It is also a geography of London, since many of the captions describe a historical map but tell the reader what the site now is so that the geographical present may be understood in terms of its historic past. This is a rather continental European approach to urban historical geography which has rather few enthusiasts left in Britain, but is nonetheless enduring interesting for those interested in the particular place. It also represents the openness of the author to continental European historiography (and indeed history, as those of us who have enjoyed his other writings know). The erudition of the author, his deep knowledge of London as well as of maps, his enjoyment of the quirky, and his sense of humour are evident from the captions and the whole structure of the book which together point to obvious themes (such as the expansion of London), but also less obvious ones (such as the continuing presence of the countryside on the city whether in place names, governance structure, or transport links). It is fitting that the book has appeared in the same year that Peter Barber was appointed OBE for services to cartography and topography. This book is a rich blend of the two in terms of the institutions which supported it and of its contents. Congratulations are due to all involved: to the London Topographical Society, the British Library, but above all to the author. Elizabeth Baigent University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.10.004

Robin Usher, Protestant Dublin, 1660e1760: Architecture and Iconography. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 245 pages, £55 hardcover. In this ambitious monograph, the fruit of a Cambridge doctoral thesis, Robin Usher attempts a detailed reading of the entire iconography of the city of Dublin, from the royal court to the private residence, during the heyday of its transformation from ‘a tatty English outpost ... to a set-piece Georgian capital’ (p. 8). Diving deep into the archives, he emerges with some new and nuanced conclusions and is unafraid to criticise more popular interpretations as lacking in empirical foundations. Usher’s material is organised around institutions or loci of authority. He shows how, unsurprisingly, the royalist and

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Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013) 139e151

anglicised elites left the deepest imprint upon Dublin’s landscape in the decades following the restoration of the monarchy. For the Stuart lords lieutenant, military success or family prowess played second fiddle to the visual dominance of the divinely-appointed king and his deputies. Nonetheless, Dublin’s conflicting identity as a national capital, yet one subordinate to London, meant that finance was lacking to construct a city to rival the architecture of other European capitals like Paris, Madrid, or Vienna. The lords lieutenant most often had to make do with embellishing medieval originals, such as Dublin castle by turning an established fortress into Ireland’s Whitehall where cannon vied with courtly display. Only sometimes were they able to build from scratch, as at the Royal Hospital of Charles II at Kilmainham, opened to military pensioners in 1684, an echo of Wren’s masterpiece at Chelsea. The Church of Ireland, representing Anglican hegemony, was another prominent locus of authority. Usher assesses the symbolic thrust of Dublin city’s churches via a series of case studies, especially of those erected during the remarkably energetic archiepiscopate of William King 1703e29. Roman Catholic chapels remained clandestine, the architecture of Presbyterian meeting houses was ‘respectfully meek’ (p. 93), but the Anglicans dominated the skyline. As King told a friend, churches without towers made Dublin resemble a cow without horns. His rebuilding programme drove home his theological agenda. Usher argues, for instance, that at Dublin’s premier parish church, St Werburgh’s, one of the most affluent in the country, King established ‘an intelligent visual articulation of the view that Anglicanism was the only proper vehicle for personal deliverance’ (p. 90). Further chapters follow on government buildings, such as the Custom House, Royal Barracks, Parliament House and Royal Exchange (now Dublin City Hall), and domestic dwellings for the burgeoning population. Usher’s central thesis is that Dublin’s topography was not moulded by a single agency, but by a range of collaborations, competing ambitions, and local interest groups. Therefore he warns against ‘abstract, inflexibly theoretical formulations of power as a functioning social entity’ (p. 205) because the symbolic landscape of Ireland’s capital reveals a more complex, diffuse, and multivalent reality. Most stimulating, and most significant, is Usher’s controversial analysis of Dublin’s eighteenth-century public sculpture, focused on three equestrian statues of William III (unveiled by the lord mayor in 1701), George I (commissioned by the city assembly in 1722) and George II (commissioned in 1758). That of George I still survives: it was removed in the 1750s and became a garden ornament, until rescued by the Barber Institute in Birmingham where it now stands. But the images of William III and George II were eradicated during the Irish Free State of the 1920s and 30s, blown to smithereens by republican bombs. Usher asserts, persuasively, that this dramatic destruction has warped our understanding of the statues’ signification. Regime change, whether in Sri Lanka, South Africa, or Iraq, often includes the stage-managed toppling of the statues of deposed governors and their replacement by new revolutionary or democratic icons. Few can forget the live television images of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s vast image in Firdos Square, Baghdad in April 2003, decapitated and dragged through the streets, stamped upon and smacked with shoes. But Usher pleads that careful cultural historians look beyond the media headlines. When reading Dublin’s landscape, he strikes out boldly against the ‘adherents of reductive colonial interpretive theories’, with their ‘vague and anglocentric suppositions’ (p. 204). In particular, he challenges the conclusions of Yvonne Whelan’s Reinventing modern Dublin (2003) and Andrew Kincaid’s Postcolonial Dublin (2006) which portray the statues and public buildings of the Georgian city as propaganda tools designed keep seditious rebels in their place. Usher wants to break free from this grand metanarrative of British conquest and Irish resistance, where the only

key moments in interpreting statuary are erection and destruction. He accepts that William III was the hero of Protestant Ireland and that annual parades passed his equine effigy were ‘part of what it meant to be a Protestant, a patriot, and a Dubliner’ (p. 111). At the same time, he insists that there was nothing explicitly ‘Protestant’ or ‘British’ about the statue: it merely followed European convention, modelled on the image of Marcus Aurelius on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Likewise the statue of George I was modelled on that of Charles I, which has watched over Charing Cross since the 1670s, and points to visual convergence between the Stuart and Hanoverian kings. Usher maintains (though the evidence is here somewhat lacking) that various meanings were invested in these statues over the generations, and that they came to stand for cultural enrichment rather than a partisan view of Irish history. When viewed exclusively through the twentieth-century lens of political violence and regime change, the internal variety of Irish Protestantism and the diversity of its iconography are easily overlooked. For most of their existence, Usher argues, these royal horsemen were uncontroversial, not the focus of animosity, so it would be a mistake to dismiss them as ‘the simple products of a quasi-British “ascendancy”, calculated to give indecent pleasure to vengeful Protestant planters’ (p. 128). Although it is doubtful that Usher has produced enough archival evidence to prove his whole case, his cautions against simplistic and anachronistic readings of Dublin’s multifarious visual landscape are well made. This volume will be of particular interest to students of architecture and aesthetics, as well as to cultural and political historians of early-modern British and Irish society. Andrew Atherstone University of Oxford, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2012.10.009

Mervyn Miller, English Garden Cities: An Introduction. Swindon, English Heritage, 2010, viii þ 116 pages, £9.99 paperback. One of a series of books produced by English Heritage in its ‘Informed Conservation’ series, English Garden Cities is a straightforward, generously illustrated, somewhat unquestioning account of what is presented as a quintessentially English phenomenon. Miller sketches a rapid and unexceptionable story of nineteenthcentury social and sanitary reform as ‘a potent mix of idealism and pragmatism’: the former included ‘a Hegelian concept of progress, the Benthamite maxim of the greatest good for the greatest number, Utopian philosophy, [and] Christian and Fabian socialism’, the latter culminated in the Garden City and Arts and Crafts Movements (p. 2). There is no space in an introductory book of this length to explore any of these themes in detail, nor any of the contradictions between the various authors whom Miller identifies on Ebenezer Howard’s reading list: Thomas More, John Ruskin, William Morris, Henry George, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy, and Herbert Spencer among others. Racing through Howard’s ‘Three Magnets’ diagram, we pause slightly longer in front of his iconic ‘Garden City’ plan, here represented by proof copies on which Howard’s own annotations and amendments emphasise its status as ‘a diagram, not a map, a sketch not a filled in picture’ (p. 6). Howard’s time in 1870s Chicago is noted, but he could hardly, as claimed, have witnessed much of ‘the emergence of the skyscraper’ (p. 3) or the development of Olmsted’s Riverside before he returned to England in 1876. Thereafter, there are few references to American or continental parallels or examples. Rather the garden city heritage is traced through Port