The urban landscape normally changes only very slowly. The enormous investment of labour power and construction materials that each building embodies is generally amortised slowly, buildings paying back that investment over a very long period of time. Thus, the physical environment appears to be relatively fi xed. Nevertheless, it does undergo change: imperceptibly at times, more rapidly at others; more quickly in some districts than in others. The profusion of cranes punctuating Ireland’s skyline over the past 15 years has been testimony to the rapidity with which the city has been changing in recent times. Indeed, many areas of the inner city have undergone a scale of transformation unseen since they were first developed during the city’s eighteenth-century ‘Golden Age’.