The pathogenic city: disease, dirt and the planning of Dublin’s Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Markets

ABSTRACT

Public health crises always have a visual impact on cities. Examples can be short lived, such as the signage encouraging social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other effects can be long lasting. During waves of epidemics over the nineteenth century in Dublin, Ireland, officials responded with projects such as fever hospitals. At first glance, market halls do not seem to correspond with these kinds of emergency initiatives. Markets are lasting fixtures of everyday life in cities, and they typically embody notions of sustenance and nourishment rather than disease. Yet in Dublin, the planning of covered markets is bound to the histories of infectious disease and epidemics. This article uses the storey of one market hall in Dublin, the City Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Markets, as a lens to elucidate the intersection of public health and urban planning between 1850 and 1900. Market halls are rarely planned as clean slates: historically, they typically stand in places that hold close connections to buying and selling. As such, purpose-built halls should not be read simply as urban, commercial interventions, but instead as buildings that monumentalize in three dimensions emergent social and moral conventions about public health in the context of the crowded city.

KEYWORDS:

• Dublin
• markets
• food
• disease
• public health
• epidemics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The research completed for this article also underpins a chapter for the author’s forthcoming volume, co-edited with Leila Marie Farah: Mobs and Microbes: Markets at the Intersection of Public Health and Civic Order. The author wishes to thank guest editor Juliet Davis, whose idea it was to organize this special collection, and the two peer-reviewers, who graciously provided constructive feedback and suggestions.

2 Indeed, this remains a common misconception about purpose-built markets. For a comparative colonial setting, but outside of the British Empire, see Beeckmans and Liora, “The Making of the Central Markets of Dakar and Kinshasa,” 412–34.

3 Park Neville and his successor, Spencer Harty, built the City Fish Market; it was completed in 1897. See Bennett, Encyclopedia of Dublin, 75. For the cattle market, see Clare, “The Dublin Cattle Market,”166–80.

4 Morgan, “Report to the Corporation Markets Committee,” 4-5.

5 Women street traders are still the victims of bias and discrimination in the present day. See “Pram Wars,” Dublin Review of Books 49 (February 10, 2014): http://www.drb.ie/blog/dublin-stories/2012/11/19/the-pram-wars. Accessed November 12, 2020. Also highly relevant is the documentary Bananas on the Breadboard, directed by Joe Lee. For vendors at the Fruit and Vegetable Market, see Martin-McAuliffe, “Feeding Dublin,” 241-53.

6 This was the norm, rather than the exception. For a Spanish comparison, see: Fava, Manel, and Oyón, “Barcelona Food Retailing and Public Markets, 1876–1936,” 454–75.

7 O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, 17. To clarify, the Dublin Improvement Act of 1849 effectively abolished and replaced the Wide Streets Commission. From 1851, the jurisdiction of the Commission was the remit of the City Council.

8 Farmers and Markets’ Commission, Ireland, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Fairs and Markets in Ireland, 31.

9 Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800-1925, 5.

10 Halliday, “Death and miasma in Victorian London: an Obstinate Belief,”1469-71.

11 Whitelaw, An Essay on the Population of Dublin, 50. See Prunty, Dublin Slums, 20-23, for a discussion of Whitelaw, his context, and the innovation of his survey.

12 Robins, The Miasma: Epidemic and Panic in Nineteenth-century Ireland.

13 Stoker, Sketch of Medical and Statistical History of Epidemic Fevers in Ireland, 30.

14 See Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire:1600-1960, 86.

15 Wilde, “Special Sanitary Report Upon the City of Dublin,” 1847. For a clarified version of this census chart and a discussion of Wilde’s report in relation to housing and streets in slums, see Prunty, Dublin Slums, 40-45.

16 Corrigan, Cholera Map of Ireland, 1866.

17 A high-resolution color image of Haughton’s 1866 map is held by the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (MS/95) and can be viewed at: http://rcpilibrary.blogspot.com/2015/04/cholera-map-of-ireland-1866.html?m=1

18 Corrigan evidently prepared his first cholera map of Ireland in 1850, four years before Snow produced the map of London’s Broad Street.

19 “Cholera Literature,” 505-8.

20 Durand, Précis of the Lectures of Architecture,161.

21 Gavin Stamp noted this correlation with Durand and Charles Fowler, the architect of Covent Garden Market Hall in London. See Stamp, “The Hungerford Market,” 58-70.

22 Thomas Willis noted that all the markets in this area “stand upon large open spaces”. See Willis, Facts connected with the social and sanitary condition of the working classes in the city of Dublin, 43.

23 Kelly, The Liberty and Ormond Boys, 2004.

24 Cullen, Dublin 1847, 2015; Lennon, Irish Historic Towns Atlas, 2008; Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin, 111.

25 Morgan, “Report to the Corporation Committee on Markets,” 4-5.

26 The dates for the construction of the Valencia market are 1839-56, and the architect was Salvador Escrig. See Colectivo Arquitectos Vetges Tu I Mediterránia. La Plaza Redonda De Valencia, 1988.

27 Redant, “Van ‘cierk’ to ‘meine’: de geschiedenis van de Oostendse vismijn”, 2005. See also http://www.coastalwiki.org/wiki/History_of_Belgian_sea_fisheries

28 I am grateful to Philip Crowe for sharing the archival documents relating to campground.

29 See Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin, 86.

30 Mapother and Cameron, Report on Health of Dublin for the Year 1867, 7.

31 For reasons of hygiene and sanitation, the meat market at Smithfield relocated further north in the 1860s. For a discussion, see Martin-McAuliffe, “The Possibility of a Re-emergent Landscape in Dublin,” 135-146.

32 Dublin Corporation, Report of the Markets Committee, 24 August 1886. Prunty, in Dublin Slums,106, comments that: “The single greatest concentration of disease was within the densely crowded Ormond Market area where 64 cases were reported, a district which features in every discussion of insanitary housing and general deprivation.”

33 Mapother, The Unhealthiness of Irish towns, 13-14.

34 Dublin Corporation, Report of the Markets Committee, 24 August 1886.

35 Dublin Corporation, Report on the Markets Construction Committee, 6 December, 1892.

36 Report of the Committee Appointed for the Local Government Board for Ireland to Inquire into the Public Health of the City of Dublin and Minutes of Evidence, 19 February, 1900, 1220-22.

37 MacLysaght, Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century, 195–196.

38 See Anne Hardy, “Exorcizing Molly Malone,” 72-90.

39 Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin, 100-101.

40 Morgan, Report to Markets Committee, 6 April, 1875, 3.

41 Notice for the appointment of a Superintendent of Fish and Vegetable Markets, Report of the Markets Committee, Dublin, 1892, 381-392.

42 For the closure of the Fish Market, see O’Brien, “Fish Market Closes: Council Calls it a Day on Dublin’s Inner City Market,” Irish Times, 6 May, 2005.

43 Kelly, “Dublin’s Victorian fruit market to close for two years for revamp: Building near Capel Street may be turned into retail-only facility with no wholesale,” Irish Times, 15 August, 2019.

44 https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer/shopping/shopping_during_covid19.html. Accessed Dec. 3, 2020.

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Samantha Martin

Samantha L. Martin is an Associate Professor of Architecture at University College Dublin. Her main research and teaching interests lie in Classical antiquity and its reception. She is co-editor (with Daniel Millette) of New Research Directions in the Study of Ancient Urban Planning in the Mediterranean (Routledge, 2018) and the editor of Food and Architecture: At the Table (Bloomsbury, 2016). Martin completed her PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of Smith College and was a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2021.