DublinBaile Átha Cliath

Dublin begins as a beach. Around 841 Viking raiders set up a fortified camp, a longphort, on the south bank of the Liffey where a smaller river, the Poddle, met the tide in a dark, deep pool. The Irish called it Dubh Linn, the black pool, and the English name Dublin comes from it. The Irish name of the city, Baile Átha Cliath, is older still and means the town of the hurdle ford, after a crossing of the Liffey near today’s Father Mathew Bridge. For two centuries the Norse town, Dyflinn, was a trading port linked to the Irish Sea, with a slave market, silver and workshops, and its kings sometimes ruled from York. The Battle of Clontarf in 1014 ended Viking political power in Ireland, though the town stayed Norse in character and trade for another century and a half.

The Normans arrived in 1170, invited by an Irish king, Diarmait Mac Murchada, to help him win back his throne. They stayed. King John ordered a castle built on the site around 1204, and it became the seat of English administration for more than 700 years. The two cathedrals date from this era: Christ Church, first founded by the Norse king Sitric Silkenbeard about 1030 and rebuilt in stone by the Normans, and St Patrick’s, founded in 1191. Trinity College was set up in 1592 by Elizabeth I, and the Book of Kells came into its keeping in the 1600s after its owners moved it to safety from the wars of the period.

The 18th century remade the city. A Protestant ruling class, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, ran an Irish parliament from a new building on College Green and laid out squares and wide streets under the Wide Streets Commission, founded in 1757. That is the Dublin of red-brick terraces, fanlights and painted doors that survives south of the Liffey. The Act of Union in 1800 closed the parliament, and the city slid into decline. Many grand houses became tenements, and by 1900 Dublin had some of the worst urban housing in Europe.

The 20th century was the century of independence. The 1913 Lockout, a bitter strike by Dublin workers, was followed by the Easter Rising of 1916, when about 1,200 rebels took the General Post Office and other sites and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Rising was put down within a week and its leaders were executed at Kilmainham Gaol, which turned public opinion. A war of independence (1919–21), a treaty and a civil war (1922–23) followed, and the Irish Free State was founded in 1922. The Four Courts were shelled in 1922 and a national archive of records was lost with them.

Modern Dublin came late and fast. Membership of the European Community in 1973, a low-tax economy and a wave of tech and finance headquarters produced the "Celtic Tiger" boom from the 1990s, and the docklands were rebuilt with glass towers. The 2008 crash was severe, and emigration returned. Today the city has about 590,000 residents and the greater area about 1.4 million, and the past is not far from the surface: plaques, bullet marks and old pubs are the guide.

Dublin is easier to read than its old streets suggest. The River Liffey runs east to Dublin Bay and splits the city in two: south of the river is the older, richer half with the Castle, Trinity College and the Georgian squares, and north is the working half with O’Connell Street, the GPO and the old markets. The postal districts follow the river. Odd numbers (Dublin 1, 3, 7, 9) are on the north side and even numbers (Dublin 2, 4, 6, 8) are on the south, and Dublin 1 and 2 are the centre.

Two canals ring the centre in a rough circle. The Grand Canal curves around the south side and the Royal Canal around the north, and both were built in the 18th century for barges and are now walking and cycling paths. Inside the ring is the part a first visit needs: about 2 kilometres from the Ha’penny Bridge to St Stephen’s Green, and 1 kilometre from Trinity to the Castle. The buried River Poddle still runs under Dublin Castle and the Liberties, and the "black pool" that gave the city its name lay where the Poddle met the Liffey, marked today by the Dubh Linn garden behind the Castle.

Four walkable clusters cover a first visit. Trinity and Grafton Street form the shopping and college spine, with the Book of Kells at one end and St Stephen’s Green at the other. Temple Bar and the Castle sit to the west, an old merchants’ quarter turned into a cobbled entertainment district in the 1990s. Georgian Dublin, with Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square and the museums, is calmer and more formal. North of the river, O’Connell Street and the GPO make a fourth cluster, wider and less polished, with Henry Street and Moore Street for shopping.

Beyond those, the city fans out along its coast. To the north, Howth is a fishing village on a peninsula reached by the DART commuter train. To the south, Dalkey and Dún Laoghaire have a sea walk and a harbour, and the Wicklow Mountains, visible on a clear day, reach south of the city. The Luas trams run east–west and north–south through the centre, and the DART follows the coast. It is the reason Dublin works as a base: a bed near the Green, then trains and buses in every direction.

The best way to learn the layout is to walk one loop. Start at the Ha’penny Bridge, a cast-iron footbridge of 1816 that once charged a half-penny toll, cross to the south bank, walk through Temple Bar to the Castle, climb to Christ Church, then turn back east along Dame Street to Trinity. That single loop covers 3 kilometres and three of the four clusters. Then cross to the north side by the same bridge for the GPO and end with a taxi home.

Most of the Dublin a visitor sees was built between about 1720 and 1820. It is Georgian architecture in the sense of the British kings named George, in red brick with stone trim, symmetrical fronts, sash windows and a fanlight over the door. The famous coloured doors are a habit of the 19th century and after, when owners painted them to tell one house from another in identical terraces. Beneath the door there is often a cast-iron boot scraper, and behind it a steep flight of steps up to a raised ground floor, because cellars sit below street level. That is why big cases and Georgian hotels do not mix.

The city’s grandest buildings were commissioned by the Anglo-Irish parliament and its officials. The Parliament House on College Green, begun in 1729, is now a bank and often described as the first purpose-built two-chamber parliament building in the world. James Gandon, an English architect, gave the Custom House (1791) and the Four Courts (1796–1802) their domes and river frontages, and both were badly damaged in the fighting of 1921 and 1922 and restored. Leinster House, the seat of the modern parliament, was a duke’s townhouse on Kildare Street. Merrion Square, laid out from 1762, is the model Georgian square, with terraces on three sides and a park in the middle; Oscar Wilde was born on the neighbouring Westland Row and lived in a house on the square.

Trinity College’s Old Library is older still. Its Long Room, built between 1712 and 1732 and raised to a barrel-vaulted hall in the 1860s, is 65 metres long and holds about 200,000 of the library’s oldest books. Christ Church and St Patrick’s cathedrals are medieval, though both were heavily restored by Victorian benefactors, notably the Guinness family, who paid for St Patrick’s work in the 1860s. Dublin Castle is a mix: a medieval tower, Georgian state rooms and a Victorian chapel. The result is a city of layers rather than a single style.

The 20th century added less glamorous pieces. Tenements gave way to red-brick corporation housing and later to towers, and the docklands, once derelict, were rebuilt from the 1990s with glass offices and theatres. The Spire on O’Connell Street, a 120-metre steel needle (2003), and the Samuel Beckett Bridge, shaped like a harp (2009), are the modern landmarks. The most successful recent change is the pedestrianisation of parts of the centre and the Luas lines that link the north and south of the city.

How to read a Georgian street: look up. The tall ground-floor windows, then a smaller floor, then a low top floor, tell you the social ladder of a house, from the family rooms at the front to the servants in the attic. The railings on the front and the area steps down to a basement show where the kitchen and coal store were. On Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, many of the houses are now offices, so you can see the doors and fanlights but not the rooms, and the Little Museum of Dublin and Number Twenty Nine on Lower Fitzwilliam Street are two of the few places to walk through a Georgian interior (check opening).

A small city that produced Swift, Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett is a good place to spend a wet afternoon in a bookshop. Jonathan Swift was Dean of St Patrick’s from 1713 to 1745 and wrote Gulliver’s Travels in the city; he is buried in the cathedral beside the woman he called Stella. Oscar Wilde was born on Westland Row in 1854 and grew up on Merrion Square; a statue of him lounges on a rock in the park opposite. William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, two of four Nobel laureates in literature linked to the city (with Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney), belong to the same world of theatres and cafés.

James Joyce left Dublin in 1904 and wrote about little else. His novel Ulysses follows one day, 16 June 1904, through the streets of the city, and every year that date is Bloomsday, when readers in Edwardian dress read passages and walk the route. You do not need to have read Ulysses to enjoy Bloomsday; the Joyce plaques, the tower at Sandycove and pubs such as Davy Byrne’s are enough. Dubliners, Joyce’s short-story collection, is the easier entry, and its ordinary streets, offices and pubs are still the streets you walk.

UNESCO named Dublin a City of Literature in 2010, and the label is earned in small ways. Bookshops such as Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street and Dubray on Grafton Street sit beside the Winding Stair on the quays. The National Library on Kildare Street has a free Yeats exhibition, and the Dublin Writers Museum at Parnell Square, and the Abbey, the national theatre founded by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, keep the stage alive. Trinity’s Old Library and Marsh’s Library, dating from 1707, are quieter places to feel the age of the city’s reading rooms.

The Irish language is the other layer. Irish is the first official language of the state, taught to every child, and it is on every street sign, bus and station name. Most people in Dublin speak English day to day, and only a minority speak Irish fluently, but you will hear it on the radio and in schools called Gaelscoileanna, where classes are taught in Irish. A few words are useful and welcome: Sláinte (cheers), go raibh maith agat (thank you), and the signs Mná and Fir on toilet doors. Dublin’s own Irish name, Baile Átha Cliath, is pronounced roughly bal-ah aw-ha clee-ah.

The English spoken in Dublin has its own flavour, called Hiberno-English. A "grand" means fine or all right, "the craic" is fun or news, "a jar" is a pint, and "yoke" is any object. Joyce and Beckett used it, and it remains the register of taxi drivers, publicans and shop assistants. If someone tells you a plan is "grand", it is; if they say "I’ll be with you in a minute", it may be several. Answer with a joke and you will be on the same wavelength.

The Irish pub is a public house in the old sense: a room where the neighbourhood meets, not just a place to drink. A pub might hold a family at lunchtime, a quiet regular at the bar, a group of musicians in the corner and a tourist party at the door, all in the same hour. The Brazen Head on Bridge Street claims the oldest licence in the country, from 1198; Mulligan’s (1782) and the Stag’s Head are among the old rooms that survive. Look for a snug, a small wooden booth at the side of the bar where an earlier generation drank privately, and for a pint of Guinness, poured in two stages and left to settle for a minute or two before the head is topped.

Guinness is part of the city. Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the St James’s Gate brewery in 1759, and the family and the brand have shaped Dublin ever since, paying for parks, hospitals and cathedral repairs. The Storehouse visit is the city’s most visited attraction and ends in a glass bar with a view. A pub pint is better and cheaper, if less of an event. Irish whiskey has come back too, with Jameson on Bow Street and Teeling in the Liberties among the working distilleries, and the tasting flight is a good rain-day plan.

Traditional music is the pub’s best gift to visitors. A "trad session" is a group of musicians, often unpaid, sitting round a table with fiddle, tin whistle, flute, uilleann pipes and the bodhrán, a hand-held frame drum, playing tunes in turn. It is not a concert. Sit nearby, keep quiet during a tune, and clap between sets. The Brazen Head, the Cobblestone in Smithfield and O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row are known session pubs, and there is usually a fee of nothing; you buy a pint. Arrive by 20:00 for a seat on a Friday or Saturday.

Food has improved more than its reputation. The classics are simple and filling: Irish stew of lamb or beef, coddle of sausage and potato, boxty potato pancakes, seafood chowder with brown bread, and a full Irish breakfast. Good bread, butter and farmhouse cheese, such as Cashel Blue and Gubbeen, come with them. Since the 2000s the city has added serious restaurants, including several with Michelin stars, and food markets such as Temple Bar’s on Saturdays. Bewley’s on Grafton Street, a café since 1927 with stained-glass windows, is the place for tea and a sticky bun.

Practical rules make the pub work better. Order at the bar and pay as you go. If you are with a group, someone buys a round, and each person takes a turn; drinking alone, you owe nothing. Do not tip for a pint, but leave about 10 to 12.5 per cent in a restaurant if service is not on the bill. The legal drinking age is 18, so carry ID, and public drinking outside a pub is restricted in many places. Finally, if you would like a quieter pint, walk two streets from Temple Bar: Kehoe’s, the Long Hall and Mulligan’s are all within ten minutes and half as loud.

Dublin’s calendar is built around a few dates. St Patrick’s Day on 17 March is a public holiday and the centre of a multi-day festival with a parade; hotels fill weeks ahead and prices rise. Bloomsday on 16 June is a literary festival by another name. The Dublin Fringe and the Theatre Festival run in September and October, and Culture Night in the third week of September opens museums and galleries with free events. Halloween on 31 October has Celtic roots in Samhain, the old festival of the turn of the year, and Christmas closes the city almost entirely on the 25th and 26th.

Weather is the real calendar. Rain can fall in any month, and it arrives in showers that clear in half an hour, so people keep a waterproof handy and a plan for indoors. Summer is mild, not hot; a 20 °C day in July fills every terrace and the parks. Winter is short and wet, with dusk at 16:30, but the city is calmer and the pubs are warmer for it. Because the days are so long in June, visitors find themselves still in the park at 21:30, and so do the Dubliners.

Sport is a serious part of life. Rugby fills the Aviva Stadium on Six Nations weekends and Gaelic games, hurling and Gaelic football, fill Croke Park in summer. These are amateur games with a stadium of 82,000, and the All-Ireland finals are the biggest days of the year for many people. Soccer, with the League of Ireland and the national team, is also popular. Match days change the city: hotel prices double, pubs are full by midday and the Luas is crowded.

Daily life follows the shape of a small capital. Most people commute by bus, tram, DART or on foot, and housing is expensive, so many residents live in the outer suburbs and commute in. Shops open around 09:00 and close at 18:00, later on Thursday; Sunday hours are shorter. Many restaurants close on Mondays. Pubs are the social centre, and a table for one is normal. The population is younger and more international than the image of a pub and a cobble: Dublin is home to European headquarters of major tech and finance firms, and you hear many languages.

For a visitor, the best way to fit into the rhythm is simple. Book the timed tickets, walk the centre in the morning, take a break in a café when it rains and go to a pub in the evening. Take the DART to the sea on a dry day. Carry a waterproof, look right when you cross the road, and say thank you to the bus driver. Dubliners are quick with a joke and an opinion, and they will help you find your way. Leave the city with a plan for the next visit; the west of Ireland is a train and a few hours away.