| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £8.85
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Dublin 1660 - 1860: The Shaping of a City for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £8.85, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'This book achieves a wonderful balance between descriptions - of great buildings,architects, their patrons and the events of history - and anecdotes which enliven the narrative' --Sunday Tribune
It is perhaps an exaggeration to describe Maurice Craig as the man who saved Dublin. However, he has certainly done more than most of us to encourage an appreciation of the city's architectural heritage. Not just Ireland's greatest architectural historian, Maurice Craig is himself a national treasure. --The Dubliner Magazine
Dublin 1660-1860 is an informative, delightful and thorough account of the transformation of a mediaeval colonial city outpost into an elegant capital --Landscape Ireland
It is perhaps an exaggeration to describe Maurice Craig as the man who saved Dublin. However, he has certainly done more than most of us to encourage an appreciation of the city's architectural heritage. Not just Ireland's greatest architectural historian, Maurice Craig is himself a national treasure. --The Dubliner Magazine
Dublin 1660-1860 is an informative, delightful and thorough account of the transformation of a mediaeval colonial city outpost into an elegant capital --Landscape Ireland
Product Description
The city of Georgian facades and broad-avenued streets that we know as Dublin today was not always so. In Dublin 1660-1860, Maurice Craig explores the city.s golden era of architecture and its growth from a relatively unimportant settlement of nine thousand souls to, as Craig puts it himself, 'the Augustan capital of a Gaelic nation'. He offers lively descriptions of many well-known Dublin locales and investigates the lobbying and political efforts involved in this growth process and examines in detail this aspect of the life of the city. As commentator and writer Mark Girouard observes in his foreword to the book, 'much work has been done since by other historians, and by Maurice Craig himself, on individual aspects of Dublin's buildings and architects, but as a masterly and enthralling general picture, nothing has replaced it'. Overall, the book is a colourful and witty survey that is certain to fund new readers as well as appealing to those who have been calling for some time for the book to be reissued.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Maurice Craig's "Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City" was originally written in the late 1940s. Its author was then around 30, but although the book has plenty of youthful energy, this feels like the work of a man drawing upon a lifetime of learning. Craig's book is essentially an overview of Dublin's architectural history, tracing how the city grew from its medieval nucleus to the splendidly conceived Augustan capital of the early 19th century. When the book was first published, much of that city was still standing. When it was first republished, in the early 1990s, the Irish government had spent a good deal of the intervening 40 years letting property developers tear down huge swathes of magnificent 18th and 19th century Dublin and build ugly and unimaginative office buildings instead.
Craig was one of the most forceful and informed voices to argue that the developers were essentially sawing off the branches they were sitting on; by destroying so much of Dublin's architectural heritage, they destroyed much of the very prestige that made the city so desirable to the investors for whom they were building the offices in the first place. Nevertheless, by a combination of tax breaks and desperate financial juggling, the Irish government manage to hornswoggle the Irish property market into a decade-long bubble, with the surreal result that in the early years of the 21st century, an unremarkable house in suburban Dublin could go on sale at the same price as a decent-sized farmhouse in the south of France.
It couldn't last, and it didn't. In the meantime, Craig's learning, his sanity and his educated love of what is best in Dublin's buildings are a rebuke to the Irish national hatred of the capital city. The Irish have, for the most part, never loved Dublin, which is why they knock it down with words and with JCBs. If more people read Maurice Craig's wise, sly and beautifully written book, the city might be in better shape. And we might not have gone mad with demolishing good old buildings to build shoddy new ones.
Craig himself is now ninety, still fairly hale, and hopefully pleased that this masterpiece is back in print once again.
Craig was one of the most forceful and informed voices to argue that the developers were essentially sawing off the branches they were sitting on; by destroying so much of Dublin's architectural heritage, they destroyed much of the very prestige that made the city so desirable to the investors for whom they were building the offices in the first place. Nevertheless, by a combination of tax breaks and desperate financial juggling, the Irish government manage to hornswoggle the Irish property market into a decade-long bubble, with the surreal result that in the early years of the 21st century, an unremarkable house in suburban Dublin could go on sale at the same price as a decent-sized farmhouse in the south of France.
It couldn't last, and it didn't. In the meantime, Craig's learning, his sanity and his educated love of what is best in Dublin's buildings are a rebuke to the Irish national hatred of the capital city. The Irish have, for the most part, never loved Dublin, which is why they knock it down with words and with JCBs. If more people read Maurice Craig's wise, sly and beautifully written book, the city might be in better shape. And we might not have gone mad with demolishing good old buildings to build shoddy new ones.
Craig himself is now ninety, still fairly hale, and hopefully pleased that this masterpiece is back in print once again.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Architecture
- Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Early Modern 1501-1700 (Tudors, Stuarts, Commonwealth, Restoration, Glorious Revolution)
- Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Ireland
- Books > History > Britain & Ireland > Queen Anne, Georgian, Victorian 1701-1901
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > History > Social & Economic History
- Books > History > World History
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
