Georgian Dublin: the doors, the squares, the symmetry
Two squares of red brick, the painted doors, and Oscar Wilde lounging on his rock. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Merrion Square
Start at the railed garden in the centre and walk the north side first — the longest unbroken run of Georgian brick in the city, with the fanlights and painted doors that ended up on every postcard. The houses are offices and embassies now, but the street barely knows it.

2. Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture
On the north-west corner of the garden, Wilde sprawls on a quartz boulder in a smoking jacket, half-smirking at the house across the road where he grew up. Walk round to read the witticisms carved on the two plinths behind him.

3. National Gallery of Ireland
Free, and the Caravaggio — the Taking of Christ, lost for two centuries and found in a Jesuit dining room — is worth the detour alone. Duck in for half an hour or save it; the Yeats rooms reward a slower visit.

4. Leinster House railings
The Dáil sits behind this gate — the seat of the Irish parliament, fronted like a country house because it was one. You can't go in without booking, but the lawn and the obelisk to Collins, Griffith and O'Connell read fine from the street.

5. Merrion Street Upper
Cut south past the Merrion Hotel and the Garden of Remembrance side of things. Number 24 is where the Duke of Wellington is said to have been born — the plaque hedges, and so should you.

6. Fitzwilliam Square
End at the smallest and last of the great squares, and the only one whose garden is still private — keyholders only. The point is the symmetry from outside: doors, fanlights, bootscrapers, coal-hole covers, all of a piece. The Luas at St Stephen's Green is a few minutes west.

Georgian Dublin: the doors, the squares, the symmetry