Streets and squares in Dublin
[1] Some names allude to the crafts and trade that was historically conducted in the area, or in some cases, to agricultural associations.
Generally, larger thoroughfare names include avenue, parade, road, and street.
Smaller street names include alley, close, court, lane, mews, place, row, and terrace.
Special locations or layouts include cottages, gardens, grove, hill, market, park, quay, square, villas, and yard and some these terms tend to be used more outside of the city centre.
Bilingual signage first appeared in the early 1900s as part of the Gaelic Revival, with some of the earliest examples found in Blackrock and were in yellow and black.
Later the colour scheme of green and white, with an enamel finish on metal sheeting, was adopted before the establishment of the Irish Free State, with these being used to replace the monolingual 19th century signs.
The numbers usually begin in topographically lower areas and proceed upward, toward higher ground away from rivers.
Typically, such terraces consisted of 4 to 20 commercial or residential buildings built at the same time as a single structure and with its own name.
Dublin's earliest roads were four long-distance routes that converged on the Gaelic-era Ford of the Reed Hurdles (Áth Cliath) over the River Liffey.
Anglo-Norman Dublin maintained the basic Viking-era street plan and enlarged the town by expansion and land reclamation from the Liffey.
Most of the streets in central Dublin retain names from the period of British rule but some have been renamed for Irish figures.
[8] The primary objection to the creation of dual-carriageways within the city was not only the demolition of so many Georgian and Victorian buildings, but that the resulting streets were "forbidding to pedestrians" and unlike the Continental boulevards that the planners cited as inspiration, the streets would be "noisy, dirty and polluted by traffic fumes".
However, the layout of the route meant that drivers would not always stay on it, defeating the intended purpose as the "inner loop" remained incomplete by 1989.
