Mount Pleasant Square is a Georgian garden square on the border of Rathmines and Ranelagh, in the city of Dublin, Ireland. It is about a twenty-five minute walk from Grafton Street.
The Georgian houses surrounding the square were constructed from around the year 1770 and the last was completed around 1830. The square is notable for its elegance and quiet charm. In her article in The Georgian Squares of Dublin, Susan Roundtree writes: "It has justifiably been described as one of the most beautiful early 19th-century squares in Dublin." In the 24 March 1978 edition of In Dublin magazine, Gordon Lynch wrote, "The recently face-lifted Mount Pleasant Square, which is protected by a preservation order, is the only curved square in Dublin, if such a thing is possible."
There are 56 terraced houses on three sides of a central open space, now housing a tennis club and a small public park. The north and south sides are crescents rather than typical borders of a square. About half of the houses are occupied by young families, while several remain in apartments. Homes on the west side have south-west facing back gardens, there is a Victorian Era post-box on the south-west corner of the square, and 24-hour disc parking is enforced.
History
Mount Pleasant Square is about 100 yards from where the Ranelagh Gardens once stood. The public park beside the LUAS station is all that remains of what were once far more extensive grounds. Richard Crosbie became the first Irish person to fly a balloon when he took off from the gardens in 1785. Crosbie wanted to cross the Irish Sea, but only made it to Clontarf. After the Act of Union in 1801, middle-class professionals abandoned Georgian mansions on the northside, and moved to places with smaller, more manageable houses in new southside suburbs such as Rathmines and Ranelagh. As Susan Roundtree notes: “The first suburban boom accelerated during subsequent generations and established the pattern of city centre migration to the suburbs.”
According to a January 2015 article in the English Daily Telegraph, Mount Pleasant in London, which presumably inspired the usage in Dublin, "was the tongue-in-cheek name for the medieval dumping ground of household refuse, ashes, and other trash, along the banks of the woefully polluted Fleet River in Clerkenwell (before the river was buried underground). The street name remains, though the irony is lost."
Mount Pleasant Square was developed in the early 19th century, much of it by the Dolan family. Terence Dolan was a glove maker from Chester who bought plots of land from a Solomon Williams (also of Chester) in three transactions: in 1807, 1808 and 1812.
On the first plot of land – on the south side of what is now the square – Dolan built eight houses (Nos 36–43). At the time, these houses would have had commanding views of the city centre. A speculative developer, Dolan leased out the properties on short leases and raised the money to build more houses. By 1812 he had acquired all the land on the north and west sides of the square.
The second son of Terence Dolan, Terence Thomas Dolan, was a key mover behind the Rathmines Township, and was one of its first commissioners in 1847. By 1848 he effectively owned 32 of the houses on the square. His son, Henry Joseph Dolan, became President of Mount Pleasant Lawn Tennis Club in the centre of the square, when it was established in 1893.
The social composition of the houses has always been varied. In the past, many doctors and solicitors lived on the square, which is relatively close to Fitzwilliam Square and the Law Library. The square once housed two schools, and in 1911 the 14 inhabitants of No 27 included a carpenter, a scholar and a fishmonger. Of the 387 people who lived on the square that year, there were 149 Catholics, 177 Church of Ireland, 20 Presbyterian, 10 Methodist and 7 Baptists. An average of 7 people lived in each house.
Architecture
Most of the houses are two-storey over basements that are below ground level. Many of the gardens have now been shortened to accommodate mews buildings. There is a lot of variation in individual house construction, as the plot sizes are not uniform.
Susan Roundtree notes that the houses were probably built by tradesmen rather than skilled craftsmen. Three bay houses were soon joined by smaller, two-bay houses that were effectively miniature versions of the city houses with two principal rooms on each floor. The basement walls are about two feet thick, with limestone calp used throughout. The windows were typical vertically sliding timber sashes.