"Bridges of Dublin" by Annette Black & Michael B Barry

Dublin City Council seem to have done a good job recognising the importance to the City (and tourists) of the city's River Liffey, and not only the river but the many bridges which cross it. They maintain an excellent website devoted to these structures, which includes not just informative material, but plenty of bridge-related stories and a substantial insight into bridge history and engineering generally.

The City Council has also published a series of books on the city's engineering history (in cooperation with Four Courts Press). "Bridges of Dublin: the remarkable story of Dublin's Liffey Bridges" (Dublin City Council / Four Courts Press, 256pp, 2015) [amazon.co.uk] is to some extent the in-print companion to the Bridges of Dublin website, and also owes a debt to Michael Phillips and Albert Hamilton's paper Project history of Dublin's River Liffey Bridges, published in the ICE's Bridge Engineering journal.

The book covers 24 structures in detail, every span across the Liffey from Lucan Bridge to the sea.

Each bridge is documented with a large 2-page photo (generally of excellent quality), often an aerial image, a location map, and a range of other images including drawings, historical paintings and etchings, and old photographs. More recent structures are often accompanied by photographs taken during construction.

The associated text provides not just a history of each bridge, or the stories associated with it, but something of a history of Dublin and wider Ireland. Most of Dublin's bridges were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, the period starting with the Acts of Union of 1801, and including the Irish War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s.

Emblematic of the role of the various bridges as political symbols, many of the spans have been renamed at key points in history. An example is the Rory O'More Bridge, renamed in 1939 after a 17th century Irish rebel leader. The bridge had previously been renamed the Emancipation Bridge in 1929 (the centenary of Catholic Emancipation), having originally been named the Victoria and Albert Bridge when first opened in 1861. This repeated renaming recurs throughout the book, and makes an interesting contrasts to other cities, such as London, where the need to mark major political change has been absent.

The bridges also encapsulate a history of engineering, as in many major and historic cities. The oldest surviving bridge is Mellows Bridge, a three-span masonry arch structure completed in 1768 to a design by military surveyor Charles Vallancey. However, older bridges crossed the Liffey in both timber and stone, and more recent structures include spans in cast iron, wrought iron, early steel, reinforced concrete, prestressed concrete, and modern steel. The most recent spans include highly contemporary structures such as the James Joyce Bridge, Samuel Beckett Bridge, and Seán O'Casey Bridge.

Much of the interest in Bridges of Dublin is in the ability to see so clearly the many historical, technical and architectural differences between the many structures, as well as their close similarities and relationships.

The text is generally good at providing some structural engineering detail for those with a more technological interest, and at crediting designers and builders. The text is not critical in nature, but is highly informative.

In addition to the sections on each bridge, there is an introduction by City Engineer Michael Phillips, which primarily relates the history of bridge engineering, and a useful chapter which sites the history of the bridges more clearly in context with the history of the city and its river (again accompanied by some very well reproduced historical images). Guides are given to two possible walking tours for the main city bridges, and a series of technical drawings are included covering key bridges, although these are reproduced too small to be of much value.

Overall, this is a very impressive book, not only for students of Dublin's architectural and engineering history, but for anyone with an interest in bridges. There are few books which bring so much well-researched information together with such an excellent range of imagery, and I can definitely recommend it to interested pontists.