Then and Now: St. Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne Hotel

Over the course of our work with the British Library Labs images collection, we’ve found that a significant portion of these digitized works are on travel: both traveller’s accounts of their journeys, and also many guidebooks.  Some of these books provide advice that would raise eyebrows nowadays; for example, Dignam’s Dublin Guide enthusiastically recommends Mountjoy…

Then and Now: the delights of Lucan

Browsing the British Library Labs images corpus for works on the subject of Ireland, I came across this familiar-looking image: This is an ad from the 1892 guidebook Visit Ireland, from Irish Tourist Development (an early Bord Failte?) and compiled by F. W. Crossley.  (You can see the other images from this work here.)  There’s…