That same year John Bush, a tourist in Dublin and a heavy claret drinker, had a similar complaint about the city's planning.

"But for the execrable stupidity of the builder, Sackville Street would have been one of the noblest streets in the three kingdoms."

Bush found it laughable that Luke Gardiner had failed, as logic and aesthetics would dictate, to end his fine broad avenue at today's Rotunda Hospital. Instead, we are left with a bronze Charles Stuart Parnell, his right arm stretched out, directing the traffic.

Gardiner's grandson made no such mistake. Twenty years later, aided and advised by the Wide Street Commissioners, Sackville Street was . . . in a move of enlightened planning of which Vitruvius would be proud . . . extended to terminate at the river. A boulevard in the grandest tradition was born.

And one which, as the tour-guides going up and down in the coaches never fail to burble, is amongst the widest streets in Europe.

The Victorians fashioned it into the nation's front room and placed monuments down the middle with the same care as china is arranged on a mantelpiece. The suggestion in 1884 that Sackville Street be renamed in honour of the Liberator was shouted down by residents and traders who worried that letters and business would be lost.

Neither group cared by the time it was officially baptised in 1924, their buildings having been levelled twice in rapid succession.

Blood sacrifice was added into the street's iconographic mix, and even as the decades rolled by and the street's fortunes sank amid pound shops and litter, its potency remained undimmed. "To try and walk down our main street waving the Union Jack, playing Orange tunes and generally rubbing our noses in it, is going too far, " was how one person rationalised his participation in last year's riots.

But, such patriotic pride notwithstanding, 10 years ago our national street had all the confidence and health of a horse in a knacker's yard.

"It was a bit like laying a new carpet in the living room, " says Kilian Skay, architect at Dublin City Council and the man who implemented the redesign of O'Connell Street.

"You take out the sofa, the dining room table, the chairs, until the room is empty, except for the telly and you think 'oh, we have to take that out as well'."

Skay has been at the heart of the twists and turns of the O'Connell Street Integrated Area Plan. Conceived in 1998 and led by the then city manager John Fitzgerald, it was charged with arresting the street's declining appeal and status. A measure of its success is that next Friday, at London's Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, a creamy envelope will be opened and O'Connell Street may be named Great Street of the Year by the illustrious Academy of Urbanism.

Commodity, firmness and delight? Standing on the new grey granite plaza in front of Francis Johnston's GPO, it's hard to disagree. Framed by clipped lime trees and cleared of all clutter, the street radiates positive feng shui. Skay is the very model of a modern Wide Street Commissioner, reducing the traffic lanes, widening the pavements, stripping out redundant signs, and slapping special planning and architectural restrictions on the buildings.

O'Connell Street isn't out of the woods yet.

A discount shop may ask the not unreasonable question, "Why Pay More Elsewhere?" but its cheap and nasty shopfront is one of many still marring the street. More seriously, the battered faces of those slumped at coffee tables and the zombie stare and addled lurch of hardcore drug users are constant reminders that the street is set deep within a poverty wasteland.

Further change is on the horizon. Lost in legal limbo for many years, the redevelopment of the four-acre Carlton cinema site is finally inching forward. And Arnotts plans to open its fist and stretch its fingers further into Middle Abbey Street and Prince's Street North. The current O'Connell Street improvements may yet be seen as the vanguard to a larger regeneration of the northinner city.

Niall McCullough, architect and author of Dublin: An Urban History, notes what can be learnt from other cities but stresses that the solution to each city is unique.

"Every place will retain its own genius, and it has to come out of the place, the weather, the people, the colour of things, the vegetation. In some ways, O'Connell Street is a leap of the imagination. You have to decide if you want to make it the major space of the city again. I'm not sure the idea of a national street is valid any longer. We have to go back to first principles and have that debate. What do we want this space to be?"

But all that is yet to come. What do the people who live and work on Ireland's main street make of it today? .

CARMEL MORAN, RESIDENT

SITTING in the bar at The Gresham Hotel or "the grand ol' dame" as she calls it, Carmel Moran is queen of all she surveys.

O'Connell Street's last resident, Moran lived above McDowell's Happy Ring House for 30 years, until she moved around the corner a year ago. "When something becomes part of your cardio-vascular system, " she sighs, "the only word for it is 'love'. The street is a rallying point . . . for better or for worse, in celebration and in angst, and it became part of who I was."

Carmel witnessed plenty of the angst, not least the IRA hunger strike riots in the early 1980s. She refused to leave. "They closed the street. And it meant that the only people there were Sinn Fein, the guards, and me. It was horrendous. You cannot understand the horror of riots until you hear all the plate glass windows being smashed, until you smell burning rubber and not know where it's coming from."

The '80s marked the street's low point. "It was in bits, but I knew the pendulum must swing back, it had to, because it is a magnificent street." She shakes her head, and admits that she was apprehensive about the redesign, even crying the day the London plane trees came down, but she supports the changes . . . "the marriage of the past and present" . . . and she loves the Spire.

She attended the formal unveiling of the Monument of Light. Dermot Lacey, the then lord mayor of Dublin, described it "as the special day for your street". But, as importantly, she saw what she describes as the Spire's christening. "It was after the Madrid bombing and our own native Spanish community gathered at the Spire and put candles there to commemorate the lostf" McDowell's remains Carmel's "old girl", just about surviving 1916 (it was rebuilt with girders salvaged from the shell of the GPO) and 1922. Up in the top floor, Carmel would fall asleep under the flickering neon lights of the jeweller's famously kitsch sign.

But her favourite time of the day was the early morning. "I could stand at the top window and look down at the street and it was empty. Just me and the seagulls. You could see the architecture so clearly. But it shouldn't be a mausoleum. It's a lived-in, worked-in city. And when I heard the water-carriers coming down, and heard the hydraulics of the buses, I thought, 'de people is back!'"

BILLY FLEMING, BUS DRIVER

'MY enduring memory as a child is the premiere of The Blue Max, and the Fokker tri-plane up on the roof of the Ambassador." Today, Billy Fleming pilots the number 11 bus from DCU to UCD. And back again, making it a neat palindrome. His route has taken him up and down O'Connell Street at least four times a day, five days a week, for the past nine years. His first journey in the morning is at 6.45am and he leaves O'Connell Street behind him at about 11.30pm.

"There has been a vast change over those years." The new bus lanes get the thumbs up, although he is a little bit more cautious about the blurring of the boundaries between pedestrians, cyclists and himself.

"We're still not fully aware of this concept of an interacting plaza, and I'm not sure whether you can have such an unfettered situation. Problems arise if you have a lot of interaction squeezed into a small area. Ten years ago, I would have been driving a General Motors engine bus, with a two-stroke diesel engine, and if you didn't hear it, you'd have wax in your ears. Today, with I-Pods and buses that have become much quieter, it's a different environment.

"From a bus driver's perspective, the interaction between a bus and bicycle is . . . to say the least . . . not desirable. This is a 12-tonne piece of equipment, and a bicycle is the most basic form of transportation. So if you are going to integrate the two, you really have to put a bit of thought into it. The central mall is underused and if I was looking to run bicycles in the Amsterdam mode, I'd put them there. I'd rather see a bicycle and a pedestrian interacting than a bicycle and a bus.

"The people are themselves almost a design feature of the street. In the initial computergenerated images of how O'Connell Street would look, there were only one or two buses going up and down it and a couple of nuclear families on the pavement. Even the sun was shining. The reality is something that the concept has to fit in withf" And the Spire? "A wonderful thing. It's become the de-facto congregating area, especially with non-nationals. Clery's clock is old Dublin. The Spire, well, it's new Dublin.

"As a bus driver, you're a tour guide, sometimes a confessor, everything. To a lot of people, the last thing you are is someone who merely takes them from A to B."

NOEL CARROLL, DEREK MCKANE AND GERRY O'ROURKE, GPO WORKERS

THE Marx Brothers of the GPO, Noel, Derek and Gerry have, between them, over 70 years of service. Listening to them bounce off each other, they make the behind-the-scenes postal action seem as fantastic as Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, with chutes, pulleys, letters and parcels zipping back and forth.

Noel sums up the changes. "The footpaths are wider, it's much cleaner and much easier for people to move. The lighting is great and the GPO looks beautiful when you're driving through the street at night." Derek chimes in, "with the doors locked." Noel nods carefully . . . "yes, with the doors of the GPO locked."

Derek, quick as a flash, "no, the doors of your car locked!"

But seriously folks, Derek continues, "anything goes down on the street and the guards are on top of it. Immediately. We kick off at half seven every morning and, as I walk down the street, it's being washed and it's then hoovered constantly throughout the day. It's taken us 20 years to get there, but we're now a European capital that's beginning to take care of business." He jerks his thumb and you can hear the steady thrum of an industrial cleaner going by, "there's a bit of pride in what's out there.

"And I like the Spire. A lot of people don't, but you won't see anything like it anywhere else in the world."

Noel is more circumspect. "It's not the most attractive looking item but, as Derek says, it's something that people will remember and associate with Dublin." Derek: "It's better than having that b*****ks Nelson up there." Noel sighs slightly. Gerry, up until this moment the Harpo of the group, says, with the drum roll in his head, "I just don't see the point."

Gerry, originally from England and as he wryly puts it "here on work exchange" continues quietly, "the changes in O'Connell Street reflect the changes in society generally. The Bank of Ireland has been replaced by an upmarket dentist, the AIB by the Grand Central Bar, and the shoe shop by Ann Summers."

As for the GPO's role in the O'Connell Street community, Noel says he knows the regulars and always recognises faces when he pops over to Clery's. For Derek, there's never a doubt as to when it's payday, "It's like the Nigerian social club, they come in to send their Western Mail money home. And you'll have a hundred Filipino nurses too, sending a bit of bob back."

LUCIA MELEGOVA, MCDONALD'S WORKER

LUCIA has just celebrated her first year in Ireland. She followed her then boyfriend over from Slovakia, swapping one capital city for another. Her partner worked in the McDonald's on Upper O'Connell Street and, just two days after her arrival, Lucia started behind the counter in the branch down the road.

"When I arrived in Dublin, I was surprised by the number of people and all the different nationalities. Bratislava's main square, Hlavne namestie, is similar to O'Connell Street but our city centre is not so big and all the shopping centres and cinemas are outside.

"At first, it was very difficult. I learned English in primary and secondary school, and then in university. But we concentrated on grammar and conversation was very different." She pauses. "And Irish-English is sometimesf strange."

Her day starts at 7am and, as shift-manager, she opens up. "In the morning, it's regular customers from around here, all dressed in suits.

I usually remember what they want for breakfast and they are very friendly. Next come the tourists, with their entire luggage." Lucia rolls her eyes to heaven, and laughs. "The Spanish never know what they want. Around lunchtime, it's a mix, and later children dressed up in their school uniforms."

The worst thing about the job? "The difficult people." Not the work team . . . Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Lithuanians, a few Irish, and one Italian guy . . . but some of the customers.

Lucia mimics them, "Gimme my food, gimme, gimme!" She is reluctant to work the night shift. "It's very hard. On Fridays and Saturdays we close at 4am. It's terrible. The drunks. The junkies."

She lives near Heuston station, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a Czech couple and an Irish girl. She walks into work along the Liffey but, once in, rarely goes outside.

There's a comfortable staff room on the top floor with a computer and a television, a refuge from the difficult people. If her day off coincides with those of her Polish, Slovak or Czech colleagues, they go for a trip somewhere.

"I would like to return to Slovakia. When I first arrived, I thought I would go home within a year. But things change. I like this job, but it will be a small part of my life. I don't know what will be in the future."