“There was originally a bench here”, we were told. We had brought our own bench, fabricated in a garden in Inchicore, made from fragments of marble from a gravestone mason in Shankill and metal from a scrapyard in Rathmines. The previous bench was significant to at least this one bypasser, who stopped to talk to us, remembering how she would sit there with her son. 

For a few minutes our replacement reintroduced a place to stop, to rest and to look, and whatever else you might do with a bench, on the banks of the Grand Canal. And then with its aluminium legs removed and carried on bungee cords, marble bench top tipped onto the caster wheel tucked beneath the seat, it was rolled away, cold autumn sun once again hitting the old bench’s phantom outline in the tarmac. Invited by the Irish Architecture Foundation to build a bench as part of Dublin’s Open House Festival, reflecting on Dublin’s approach to public infrastructure through the vehicle of a humble seat, we transported our bench from place to place and talked to those we met along the way, about public space, and about Dublin.

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The bench has its own personality, made from bits of Dublin, yet looked quite at odds with everything around it. The seat consisted of three broken fragments of Carrara marble fastened to an armature of metal grating, laid on a pair of mismatched legs. The thing itself is quite different to what we sketched out when discussing what an object that embodies the character of Dublin might be. Yet somehow it must be a reflection of the city - it reveals another side, maybe an unexpected one, some hidden identity. Built through DIY methodologies, it was designed through the act of construction, in relation to the materials we found, the constraints of the city’s transport, and the skills we could learn from other friends here. The object manifests as an almost automatic response to that which was offered to us circumstantially, by the city; a reconstitution of ruined bits of urban waste, discarded things which nevertheless played some previous part in the grand narrative of Dublin. Breton described this as “the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths”, deciding that such spontaneously developed solutions are “always superior…rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need” [1].

This sense of excess is not something which could be ascribed to many public amenities in Dublin - the general discourse tends to be more one of lack, of exclusion. While excess is not an approach which should be generally applied to the city’s urban spaces in terms of material, there is definitely cause for more generosity of intention. In its excessive-ness the bench represents an attitude towards the shape and feel of our public spaces. It offers a portrait of a place which reveals itself rather than one which is preordained, a place which might offer many yet-unknown possibilities to the city’s inhabitants, which might embody its own value to our collective public life.

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The spaces around the Grand Canal in Portobello have already provided a case study for this accidental, or perhaps provoked, collective appropriation of public space. Earlier in the year, following the removal of an encampment of homeless people, many of whom were immigrants and asylum seekers, fencing was installed along the canal banks, displacing those living there, and excluding the public from a valued and diversely-used shared space. In response, a guerilla art installation was produced, led by Rank’n’File Collective, turning a physical marker of exclusion into a backdrop for works of protest, and expressions of disapproval from community members. 

“This fence is racist. This fence is anti-homeless. This fence is anti-community. This fence will be torn down” [2].

The fence became the framework for a public exhibition space, easy to hang works from, lined along a busy pedestrian path, an accidental design language for a public space of dissent, before being torn down by protesters and finally removed by Waterways Ireland and Dublin City Council. Lefebvre writes that “The street is disorder… This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises” [3]. The design of public spaces is not a fixed production, but something which grows through occupation, formulating itself functionally and aesthetically through its unpredictable use and misuse.

This was not the first time this part of the city found itself at the centre of Dublin’s battle for non-commercial public space. Portobello Square has become emblematic of this tension, between the living city and the intense council oversight attempting to enforce both a public order and a fixed public aesthetic. 

The square was a popular social space and an important part of Dublin’s skate community, “a rare example of what can be on offer for anyone who wants a space to socialise in the city, without the need to pay for doing so” [4]. This was until its closure in 2021 to provide storage space for the construction of a new hotel, hoarding off a public amenity for the private use of a commercial entity, in return for the vague promise of future landscape redevelopment on the site. This came after a long period of protest and attempts by the square’s users to begin conversations around its development into a more sustainable public space through the provision of toilets and bins, actions which were returned with an increased Garda presence.

The harris fencing exhibition was an echo of a previous work by Reclaim Our Spaces, who pasted a participatory timeline on the sites surroundings in 2023, reflecting on the square’s value to the city and the implications of its redevelopment on local people. The fact that this redevelopment failed to reflect the character or use which the place previously embodied, in many ways actively suppressing those uses through the implementation of skate stopping furniture, shows the direct conflict of public infrastructure development with actual public sentiment. Between occupation, temporary closure, and potential formalisation, the square is in stasis.

The discourse around Dublin’s public spaces and infrastructures is a frequently negative one. As a symbolic object, the public bench represents many of Dubliners’ most deeply felt qualms with their city; homelessness, price inflations, diminishing cultural amenities, lack of non-commercial urban space. It embodies the idea of public infrastructure in general, as an object which invites anyone to stop and stay in a specific place, without cost or criteria. Public infrastructures are conduits for how we can interact with the city, as individuals and communities, and their presence implies a trust in the city’s inhabitants, simply to be and use their city as they see fit. As a designed, material object, a bench may proclaim the value we place on our shared urban fabric, on our city’s character. 

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Before arriving at the IAF’s exhibition space on Charlemont Walk, the bench travelled for one day around Dublin, hosting a series of discussions with local occupiers of public space and random passersby, who shared their time and views with us. What’s clear from these discussions is that, bench or not, people will find a place in the city to do what they want to. Yet a bench signifies a generosity, a shared amenity which somehow one expects as a right of the urban dweller, even for those who are less compelled or less able to carve out their place in the public realm through more unconventional means.

We are left to wonder - if so much happens in the absence of characterful, situated, or even basic infrastructure, what is possible if the public are supported in their inhabitation of our shared spaces?

The Irish Architecture Foundation commissioned rubble to make Benchmark on the occasion of Open House Dublin 2024. The commission is part of Rubble’s participation in GapLab, a programme of strategic mentoring and development for graduate architects to support and sustain risk and their critical practice in architecture.

You’ll eventually ruin a good thing if you’re always questioning it.

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Growing up in Longford you are conscious of the identity of this small town. A town which was stretched like a cloth in many ways and was never certain of what it wants to be. The Main Street, the Train Station, the Market Square and the Cathedral, each of the town's main focal points and civic centres all detached, becoming islands in their own right, separated by tarmac streams and rivers. 

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The rambling Park Road becomes Earl Street as it meets the station, then Ballymahon Street as it strides past the Market Square, and before you know it you are on Main Street with little give away that there has been any change at all; bar the street signs high on the corner buildings edges. As this long stretch of street intersects with the river Camlin it becomes Bridge Street, previously the gateway to the rest of the town, when Longford's centre was perched on the north embankment.

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A path taken by many crossing Ireland along the Slighe Assail, an ancient highway running East to West from the Drogheda area, upon which the urban centre of Longphort is believed to date from. Born around the fifteenth century with its inception as a Gaelic market settlement, Longford once trickled parallel to the north bank of the River Camlin. The original town ‘square’ or trapezoid was capped by a market house, flanked to the west by O’ Farrell’s castle and St John’s Church to the East. This square, unnamed, was once the epicentre of the ‘old town’, yet now it's little more than a chicaned byroad and car parking for the solicitors and dentists which occupy the grandest buildings sitting nearby. Contrary to its place of origin, along the clay banks of the river, Longford never intended to interact with the river so intensely – it was always about overcoming an obstacle, acting as a resting stop, halfway across Ireland. A town of streets, an arguably linear settlement with unrhythmic public space due to its origination as that of a road, uncertain what its hierarchical formation is.

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The development of the cavalry barracks in the early eighteenth century pushed public life south of the river, with industry and manufacturing happening along the south bank with businesses – such as a distillery, corn mill and tannery – making use of the fast flowing Camlin. But, as described in the Historic Towns Atlas of Longford, the greatest boost to the towns economic life  came with the Royal Canal in 1830; in part due to plans for the canal to pass only eight kilometres from the town and local traders successfully convincing the canal company to build a harbour in Longford town. With this significant investment of infrastructure, many large-scale buildings began to pop up around the town. A new market hall, a market square adjacent and, of course, storehouses and warehouses. This area to the south of the town had at this stage totally taken over the old town as the commercial centre, as larger institutional buildings and residences were built to the north. It is these two spaces that act as the focus to this discussion, as one playfully juxtaposes the other. 

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The town, in many ways, is a town of urban iconography. Upon the sports shirts and school crests sits the cathedral; at the end of the main street stretch sits the Barracks wall’s and gate’s; while the market building stands free in the largest open ‘square’. Everyone knows these icons, yet rarely interacts with them, only in a way akin to how you might interact with a ruin that you might spot as you pass by. This iconography is personified by St Mel’s Cathedral, which was described as ‘an act of faith in stone’, or as I like to think of it, a cathedral at the junction of four roads. The fabric as I said is stretched, it doesn’t have a coherent pattern, perhaps why the town has behemoths like St Mel’s, the Market Square and Connolly Barracks; landmarks with such purpose that it didn’t matter where they rooted as long as they are seen to be there.

This is where I begin to wonder if it is Longford's relationship to modernity that caused the urban downfall of both the ‘old’ town square in the north and the new market square to the south. The market square could be looked at as a piece of pre-modernist planning, with the aim of creating a societal appreciation for the town's fabric through the creation of a larger, more accessible space focused on access; facilitated by barge, cart, and automobiles. It is through the use of the public infrastructure network surrounding the market square that the space thrives. Yet, it is these factors that have created its ‘island’ issue. 

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When I return to Longford and I walk between the Market Square and Church Street, I now realise that neither of these spaces are really working hard for the town; it is the icons that occupy them that are working hard for themselves while it is everything that connects them that is hardly working. A town born on the side of the road lost its identity somewhere along the way, and now in its hopeful adolescence, I hope these spaces can be seen, reimagined as possible palazzos, surrounded by institutions that beam the richness of the town's history. If we stop looking at these squares from the seats of our cars and occupy the street, we might really begin to understand what needs to change to allow the town to hardly work for its appreciation again.

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The living room
When speaking against mono-functional public space, Jan Gehl, architect and urban design author, suggested that the private living room provided a successful example of a space that allows for an independent yet connected experience: “in the living room all members of the family can be occupied with various activities at the same time, but individual activities and people can also function together”.¹ Here Gehl’s metaphor captures part of the intuitive draw of public space, which can be considered more broadly in typologies such as public libraries and museums, where cognitive engagement oscillates between the individual mind and communal room.

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Through the example of an historical landscape in Glasgow and one in Dublin, this article proposes a new type of outdoor ‘living room’: the Victorian Garden Cemetery. Inspired by their origin, this piece contemporises these spaces by making the argument that through collaboration and creative intervention, these spaces can offer a multifunctional experience that brings together open greenery, cultural engagement, and socialisation.

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Garden oases
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of cities across the UK and Ireland boomed due to industrialisation. Consequently, deaths rose, and small burial grounds, often attached to modest churches, became overcrowded and unsanitary. The garden cemetery, an idea produced to cope with this rising demand, allowed dedicated burial landscapes to be built on the periphery of urban centres, providing a solution to concerns around air pollution and the inhumation of bodies, while offering spaces for recreation and peace segregated from growing working towns.

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Le Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris) opened for burials in 1804 and provided a blueprint for those that followed. Winding paths with picturesque backdrops of designed landscapes, and protruding monuments of architectural and artistic merit littered these new grounds. Beyond providing safer and healthier outdoor space, these gardens aimed to inspire contemplation and reflection. In 1843, John Claudius Loudon, the author of On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries, stated: “Churchyard and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the morals, the taste and, by their botanical richness, the intellect, but they also serve as historical records”. ²

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Glasgow Necropolis
Ideas behind the garden cemetery movement are potent in Glasgow Necropolis, the first of its kind in Scotland. Its 50,000 burials and 3,500 monuments sit upon a prominent hill, north-east of the city’s cathedral. Victorian families with financial wealth could afford plots and the commissioning of tombs, gravestones, and memorial monuments were often used to reflect social status. Consequently, the necropolis is today an open-air exhibition of architectural follies reflecting examples of Classicism, the Gothic, the Romanesque, and Renaissance styles. The site is currently maintained by the charity Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, who graciously volunteer to preserve the grounds and share knowledge to visitors through guided tours and publications. The grounds are otherwise used predominantly as a thoroughfare and for general park activities.

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Strolling through the winding pathways, surrounded by greenery and pockets of architectural and social history, provides a similar experience to other cultural typologies. Yet, historical assets like the necropolis have potential to be elevated and provide more diversity among people’s choice of public urban space; to inwardly reflect and respectfully socialise in outdoor recreation. Instead of remaining as a static remnant of Glasgow’s past, a layer of contemporary intervention would reinvigorate the necropolis to encourage this, which can be achieved through forms of artistic collaboration.

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Goldenbridge Cemetery
Located in Dublin, Goldenbridge Cemetery was, like the necropolis, inspired by Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Established in 1828 by Daniel O’ Connell, Irish political leader and activist, it was Ireland’s first non-denominational burial grounds since the century Reformation. Though just  acres, it is anchored by a large neo-classical mortuary chapel, surrounded by mature yew, oak and cypress trees. Despite its small scale, local initiatives have innovated the cemetery’s use, pushing it to provide a more multifunctional experience for the public.

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Common Ground, a community arts organisation, moved into the cemetery’s lodge in 2016, and now use the building as workspace and to house artist studios. The organisation offers artist residencies where creatives are invited to respond to the cemetery and local area. Other community groups and artists now activate the burial space through creative intervention, welcoming introspective socialisation into the grounds where the public can perambulate individually and engage in the work collectively. For example, in 2020, the mortuary chapel was used as the stage for two musicians in the making of a film, by the Family Resource Centre, to raise awareness around violence against women. In the same year, artist Kate O’Shea exhibited a print installation of her collaborative work that called attention to spatial injustice in relation to gentrification.

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Goldenbridge’s creative engagement offers a precedent for cemeteries across Ireland and the United Kingdom. By developing a programme of considered, artistic interventions to unused garden cemeteries, an outdoor multifunctional experience of Jan Gehl’s living room would be available to the public; a space where people can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.