Dublin Town Planning Competition: Ashbee and Chettle's The New Dublin - A Study in Civics

The image of a neo-classical, grand Dublin, "the second city of the empire" which is familiar to many, owes much to the foresight and guidance provided by Dublin's Commissioners for the Making of Wide and Convenient Streets and Ways. But behind and alongside the grandeur and the splendour of Georgian Dublin there was another reality, a population of deprived, under educated, poor and unemployed living in slums in back alleys, mews courts and lanes and especially concentrated in the western half of the city (Warburton et al, 1818). But in the 19th century following the Act of Union of 1801, and especially in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, there was a sharp fall in agricultural prices and the consequent economic decline of much of the country was to affect both Dublin's gentry and its poor - a poor population swollen by an influx from "the poverty stricken countryside as Dublin literally became another pool of Bethesda", (Larkin, 1998).