Georgian Dublin: The Squares and What Came After
Four decades of speculative building gave Dublin its brick terraces, fanlights and railings. Walk the squares in the order they were laid out and watch the ambition run out.
This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.
At ~86 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Dublin makes a full-day itinerary.
More walking tours in Dublin
- Heart of Dublin: Temple Bar & Historic Highlights — 5 stops, ~50 min
All Ireland walking tours · All 149 routes
Dublin, Ireland · ~86 min · 2.5 km · 6 stops
Stops on this walk
1. St Stephen's Green
A common where people were hanged and cattle grazed, turned into a public park by a brewer.
The Green was common land until 1664, when the city enclosed it and sold the surrounding plots to pay for the work. For a long time it was a place for grazing, for public whippings and for hangings. It was railed off and reserved for residents of the surrounding houses until 1877, when Arthur Guinness — Lord Ardilaun — paid to have it laid out as a park and opened to everyone. The layout you walk today, with its lake, bandstand and winding paths, is the one his money bought.
A park that had to be bought back for the public tells you who the Georgian city was built for in the first place.
2. Iveagh House
Two Georgian townhouses joined behind one stone front — and given away in 1939.
Numbers 80 and 81 St Stephen's Green began as separate houses in the 1730s. Benjamin Lee Guinness bought both in the 1860s, knocked them together and faced the result in Portland stone — which is why this one building has a stone front on a street of brick. In 1939 Rupert Guinness, the second Earl of Iveagh, gave the house to the Irish state. It has been the Department of Foreign Affairs ever since.
The same family paid for the park behind you and handed over the house in front of you. Georgian Dublin's afterlife was largely written by brewing money.
3. Government Buildings
The last thing the British administration built in Dublin — finished just as it left.
This was begun in 1904 as the Royal College of Science, designed by Aston Webb and Thomas Manly Deane in an Edwardian Baroque quite unlike the brick around it. It was opened by George V in 1911 and finished in 1922. 1922 is also the year the Irish Free State came into being. The building passed straight from one administration to the other and has housed the Irish government ever since.
Georgian Dublin was built by private speculators; this was built by a state that was about to stop existing here. The change of style is the change of subject.
4. National Gallery of Ireland
A gallery that exists because a railway promoter wanted to be thanked.
William Dargan organised the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1853 on Merrion Square and largely paid for it himself. The public subscription raised to thank him was turned into a gallery instead, and it opened in 1864. Its best-known holding was not bought. In 1990 a Jesuit house in Dublin was found to be keeping Caravaggio's lost 'Taking of Christ' on a dining-room wall; it is now on indefinite loan here.
The exhibition that prompted all this stood on the square you are about to walk into. The gallery is the leftover of a party.
5. Merrion Square
The best-preserved Georgian square in Dublin — and the doors everyone photographs.
The square was laid out from 1762 by John Ensor for the Fitzwilliam estate. The houses are not identical: the estate sold plots with rules about height and window lines, then let each builder do as he liked with the door. Oscar Wilde grew up at Number 1, on the corner nearest the gallery. Daniel O'Connell lived at 58 and W. B. Yeats at 82. The park in the middle stayed private to residents until 1974.
The famous doors are what uniformity looks like when you leave one thing unregulated. Rules made the terrace; the exception made the photograph.
6. Fitzwilliam Square
The last Georgian square Dublin built — and the only one whose park is still private.
Building began in 1791 and did not finish until the 1820s. By then the Act of Union had moved parliament to London, the aristocracy had followed, and the market for large Dublin townhouses had gone. Fitzwilliam is the smallest of the squares because the money ran out. The central garden is still held by the residents of the surrounding houses and is not open to the public. Of Dublin's Georgian squares, it is the only one where that arrangement never ended.
You have walked the squares in the order they were built. The city got smaller as it went, and the last locked gate is where the money stopped.