Continuous Monument

The centre of Limerick city stands out as a model of order and regularity. With singular force, its distinctive grid orientates the city in the landscape. The Shannon meanders wildly but the city appears to be aligned with it. The surrounding hills rise some distance away to the north but the city appears to be arching towards them. Limerick is a destination but it is also a compass: it draws you in and it sets you out.

The Georgian grid of Limerick is approximately half a mile long and wide. Like in all Georgian cities, the ground underneath is nowhere natural. It was scraped, shifted and rammed until the streets formed an artificial well-serviced lattice raised over the original landscape. This lattice is Limerick’s principal monument, a continuous monument.

Edmond Sexton Pery, MP for Limerick, owned most of the land for the extension that is known today still as New Town Pery. He further owned a residence on Sackville Street, Dublin (the present O’Connell Street), the redevelopment of which in the mid 18th century must have had a profound influence on plans for Limerick. The setting out of the grid followed from the placing of George’s Street. Running parallel with the Shannon, it hooks at one end with the new Customs House (now The Hunt Museum) a neo-Palladian building carefully drawn by Davis Ducart in his view of the city. In the east-west direction, the grid divides in three blocks of 300 feet each, with one or two smaller blocks filling the remaining space to the boundaries. Whenever possible blocks are square, their width being matched in the north-south direction. By and large this plan corresponds to what exists today.

Only one aspect of the Georgian grid remains consistently regular: the width of the streets. At 60 feet wide, they are considerably larger than the streets of the preceding Englishtown and Irishtown, from the medieval period. This generous provision was repeatedly mentioned in lease documents. It was clearly deliberate and a matter of some pride. Christopher Colles, Davis Ducart and Edmund Sexton Pery could have been inspired by many a Georgian development, not least Sackville Street in Dublin with its central mall, then justly regarded as one of the most attractive streets in Europe. Such streets were places of promenade, made for fresh air, gossip and display, to be enjoyed by foot at certain times of the day, and in the carriages that became increasingly numerous in the second half of the 18th century. The great width of the streets and the doubling of the area of Limerick fully justify Colles’ inscription on his drawing describing Pery’s plan ‘extensive and elegant’.

The venues listed here have been selected to draw out these unique characteristics of the city, while the corresponding artworks at these venues (all of which were temporary installations and are no longer on view) represent memory traces of architectural and site-specific reflection.

– Peter Carroll (with acknowledgement to Irénée Scalbert and Dr. John Logan) (2022)

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Peter Carroll is an architect who established A2 Architects Ltd with Caomhán Murphy in 2005, becoming Sole Director in 2012. The practice is a registered RIAI practice with Conservation Grade 3 accreditation. Since graduating with 1st Class Honours from University College Dublin in 1995, Carroll has gained extensive Irish and international experience on a broad range of building types and sizes. Prior to establishing A2 Architects, Carroll spent seven years as an Associate with O’Donnell & Tuomey in Dublin, followed by a further three years as an Associate with the Pritzker Prize recipient Rafael Moneo in Madrid, Spain. Since 2008, he has worked as Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture University of Limerick (SAUL).