Merrion Square and Georgian Dublin Travel Guide

East from St. Stephen's Green stand Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares which, along with the surrounding streets, form the heart of what's left of the city's Georgian heritage . Representing the latest of the city's Georgian architecture - decrepit Mountjoy Square and Parnell Square, north of the river, are almost all that's left of the earlier Georgian city - their worn, red-brick facades are a brilliant example of confident, relaxed urban planning. The overall layout, in terms of squares and linking streets, may be formal, but there's a huge variation of detail: height, windows, wrought-iron balconies, ornate doorways, are all different, but the result is a graceful meeting of form and function that's immensely beguiling.

The apogee of the Georgian area, imbued with an atmosphere of grandeur and repose, Merrion Square , built around 1770, has been home to a lot of well-known people including Daniel O'Connell, the Wildes, W.B. Yeats, and Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger. However, it hasn't always been an area devoted to gracious living: during the Famine, between 1845 and 1849, the park in the centre of the square was the site of soup kitchens to which the starving and destitute flocked. Today, the buildings are mainly occupied by offices, but the square still retains a residential feel, and a core of people still live here. The park railings are used on Saturdays and Sundays by artists flogging their wares, and the area is also a centre for most of Dublin's private galleries. On the northwest corner of the square is a statue of Oscar Wilde lounging insouciantly on a rock, while opposite are two marble plinths displaying many of the wit's epithets. Looking along the south side of the square, you experience one of the set pieces of early nineteenth-century Dublin's architecture: the hard outlines, pepperpot tower, Ionic columns and pediment of St Stephen's Church.