Dublin, drawn from its own streets.

Dublin on paper

The Liffey runs west to east across the frame with a quay street on each bank for its whole length, so the print carries three parallel lines through its centre before a single building is considered. The bridges cross at short intervals, closer together than in most capitals, and the river ends in the docks at the eastern edge where the basins cut into both banks.

The canals are what make the composition. The Grand Canal loops around the south of the city and the Royal Canal around the north, each one a long even curve that meets the river near the sea, and between them they enclose the Georgian core as neatly as a drawn boundary. Inside that enclosure the streets are a mix: the planned eighteenth-century squares print as green rectangles with hard street edges, while the older lanes west of the centre keep their kinks and narrow runs.

Beyond the canals the grain turns to terraces and avenues — Rathmines and the southern suburbs in long straight roads, Stoneybatter's tight little streets north of the river, Clontarf facing the bay along the coast road. The eastern end of Phoenix Park closes the frame's western side as open ground with almost nothing drawn in it. Eight kilometres across holds the river, both canals, the Georgian core and those districts; tighten to two and one of them fills the paper.