'Lines endowed with lawful force': the maps and drawings of the Wide Street Commissioners, Dublin, 1758-1849 by Dr John Montague, Associate Professor Architecture, College of Architecture, Art & Design at the American University of Sharjah.

John Montague, PhD, is Associate Professor of Architecture, in the College of Architecture, Art and Design, at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. He is co-author of John Rocque’s Dublin: a guide to the Georgian City (Royal Irish Academy, 2010), Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. iv: Architecture, 1600–2000 (Yale, 2014), and the recent Listowel Writers’ Week, History Prize winning, Dublin Castle: from fortress to palace. Volume 1, Vikings to Victorians: a history of Dublin Castle to 1850 (Government of Ireland Publications, 2022). He is currently bringing to completion a volume on the maps and drawings of the Wide Streets Commissioners, the subject of this seminar, to be published by University College Dublin Press, and has been commissioned to write the introduction to a new facsimile edition of John Rocque’s 24-sheet 1746 London map, for the London Topographical Society, planned for 2026.

The Wide Streets Commissioners were established as a project of the Irish parliament in 1758, at first simply to open a new route from Essex Bridge (the last bridge on the Liffey before the sea) to Dublin Castle. By the middle of the following century, when they were disbanded in 1849, this planning body had opened up a suite of impressive boulevards through the centre of the city, including brand new streets cut through the fabric of the older city, while older streets were widened and straightened, and given architecturally disciplined façades. Over 800 of the original manuscript maps and drawings of the Commissioners have survived, many made by a father-and-son team who managed the project for almost seventy of the Commission’s ninety years. These maps yield an unrivalled record of the process of shaping an early modern European city, as well as how this city appeared before the Commissioners got to work. While the openings were far less numerous than those carried out by Haussmann in Paris, they predated his project in some cases by as much as a century. No equivalent body existed for any other national capital at this time, nor indeed was there such coordinated planning across a whole city over such a long period. This seminar presentation will give a flavour of the kinds of maps and drawings made by the Commissioners, a general overview of what they achieved, and some consideration to the origins of their work in European, British and Irish planning and map-making practices.