About the project

During 2025, I am holding a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship entitled ‘Rainfall and the Irish Urban Experience, 1800-2000’, which use urban archives, the built environment, and meteorological data to explore the how weather has shaped the built form and experience of Irish towns and cities.

In the towns and cities of western seaboard of Ireland, it rains more than 250 days a year, a notable wetness of the air which shifts from swirling moisture to pounding rain as weather systems roll in from the Atlantic. But despite this distinctive, challenging climate, the weather often remains in the background when we write urban history. Indeed, the sources urban historians have generally used for writing the history of the city—council minutes, architectural plans, and sociological reports—fail to do justice to how the city is experienced through and within weather, and how much urban places change in differing climatic conditions. This research project is intended to address this lacuna, situating living with rainfall as crucial to Irish processes and experiences of urbanization. Exploring the intertwined histories of rainfall and urbanization from the beginning of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, I will examine a new set of overlooked urban innovations and infrastructures which were crucial to patterns of urbanization; explore a new set of rain-dependent urban agents including bryophytes, insects, and fungi which found new ecosystems in wet walls and damp thatch; provide a new social history of urban life which foregrounds the weather as constitutive of  urban culture, commerce, and experience; and examine anxieties associated with rainfall including the spread of potato blight, radioactivity, acid rain, and climate change, which have raised questions about the limits of urban governance and the impact of global capital on Irish towns and cities.

Pursuing this project has given me the chance to be expansive and exploratory in my use of sources. So far I’ve read the minutes and letter books of town commissioners, had a look at urban photography, and examined architectural and engineering plans of drains and drainage systems. I’ve also tried to push myself to be more creative in my use of sources, thinking about how to write about the feeling of damp buses or pubs on wet days; the reflections of wet streets at dusk in the rain, the sound of rain on glass and concrete; and the crystalline look of ironwork and branches after a shower.

I’m running this project in partnership with the Irish Georgian Society and Kerry Writer’s Museum, so we’ll be running some knowledge exchange and public engagement activities later in the year.

About the project