A City Runs Through Them

An original and fascinating history of Dublin that tells the story of the city through its bridges. Dublin started life on the south bank of the River Liffey and for six or seven centuries that is more or less where the town stayed. In all that time, there was only one bridge across the river. Then, suddenly, in the twenty years after 1670, three more bridges were thrown up and the north side was born. Within a century, Dublin was being talked of as one of the ten largest cities in the whole of Europe. Built over a span of a thousand years, the twenty bridges that now traverse the tidal section of the Liffey have each contributed to the city's development, as it pushed through the open fields north of the river and east towards the bay, so much so that it is possible to piece together Dublin's history by tracing their construction in chronological order. Starting with Church Street Bridge, Dublin's first, which dates back to the Vikings, and ending with Rosie Hackett Bridge, erected in 2014, Fergal Tobin charts the rise of Ireland's capital city as never before and reveals how, perhaps more than any other city in the world, it has been truly made by its bridges.

Fergal Tobin was a freelance writer and historian. His career was in publishing and he was president of the Federation of European Publishers in Brussels from 2010 to 2012. Under the pen name Richard Killeen he wrote several acclaimed works of Irish history, including Ireland inBrick and Stone: The Island's History and Its Buildings, The Historic Atlas of Dublin and The Concise History of Modern Ireland. His previous book, The Irish Difference, was chosen as a Book of the Year by the Irish Times. Fergal died in February 2023, just after he finished writing A City Runs Through Them.