This collection is an example of urban cartography and documents the development of the ancient Dublin City Estate within the original walled city. Dublin City Assembly acted as one of a number of landlords with estates in the city and persued a policy of leasing its lands to improving tenants. The City Estate was leased to Dublin’s merchant class who built houses, stables, ware-houses and out-buildings on their holdings.
The post of the City Surveyor was established in 1679 after John Greene Jr. petitioned Dublin Corporation to create the position. At the time there was no overall planning authority for the city. The role of the City Surveyor was to record rather than to plan such development. His involvement in planning was confined to dividing ground in lots for setting.
In the period covered by this collection the post of City Surveyor was held by the following;
John Green Jr. 1679-98
Barnaby Hackett 1689-90
Joseph Moland 1698-1718
James Ramsey 1718-35
Roger Kendrick 1735-64
Thomas Mathews 1764-82
Samuel Byron 1782-95
D.B. Worthington 1795-1801
A. R. Neville 1801-28
This collection was bound into a volume known as the Book of Maps of the Dublin City Surveyors, thought to have been bound together after 1825. The maps were professionally conserved between 1982 and 1983, and are now presented as single items.
The book of maps contains 151 distinct representations. Of these 131 are currently digitised and available here.
The metadata in this colection is based on the work of former City Archivist Dr. Mary Clark, the arrangement and numbering of the maps is as devised and published in her "The Book of Maps of the Dublin City Surveyors 1695 - 1827" (Dublin Corporation, 1983).
