Monkstown and Salthill, located approximately six miles from Dublin City, was transformed in the early nineteenth century from a rural fishing village and seasonal resort into a fashionable residential suburb for the emerging middle classes. The transformation of the area in the early nineteenth century created a place which was neither fully rural nor urban but an in-between, peripheral space. This was evident in D’Alton’s description of Monkstown in 1838 as ‘a locality, not perhaps in itself either town or village, but surrounded by elegant villas, noble demesnes, and tasteful bathing lodges’. The juxtaposition of rural idyll and fashionable suburbia created a new territory in Monkstown and Salthill. A new suburban landscape emerged which was defined by streets, rows of terraced houses, detached and semi-detached villas and gardens.

The idealised notion of the ‘private, healthy, quasi-rural existence that lies at the heart of English suburbs’ has been examined by J.W.R. W hitehand, Christine Carr, Robert Fishman, F.M.L. Thompson, H.J. D yos, David Cannadine, Elizabeth McKellar and Gillian Darley among others. The creation of the maritime suburb of Monkstown embodied the key concepts of suburban space as defined by Fishman, which included the separation of home from workplace, middle from working class and the rise of romantic and religious beliefs promoting the natural and the rural. Neither city nor country, the emerging nineteenth-century suburb of Monkstown was part of the fragmentary and scattered nature of the changing coastal landscape. It was difficult to define these spaces when the terms ‘rural’ and ‘suburb’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ were neither stable nor absolute. The clear boundaries between town and country, and between classes and cultures, were becoming blurred by the rapidity of suburban growth in the early nineteenth century.

Monkstown was part of the 420 acre Dublin estate jointly inherited by Thomas Vesey, 1st Viscount de Vesci, and Edward Michael Pakenham, 2nd Baron Longford in 1778. Their heirs John Vesey, 2nd Viscount de Vesci (1771–1855) and Thomas Pakenham, 2nd Earl of Longford (1774–1835) oversaw the rapid development of the area in the first half of the nineteenth century. The changing nature of these spaces from rural resort landscapes to suburban residential areas was influenced by the ground landlords, the agents for the estate and speculative developers.