"the urb it orbs"

Urbi et Orbi ('to the city [of Rome] and to the world')

A view of the river Tiber and the Cathedral of St Peter's in Rome in at the turn of the twentieth century.

Centres are the product of history and geography, and part of the history of every city centre in the world is a history, and a geography, of water. Just as the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter of Finnegans Wake contains the names of over a thousand rivers, so hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE.
        
HCE personifies the Viking-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.

There is a section in Louis O. Mink's - A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer (1978), pointing to this aspect of Joyce's work.

What has not been noted before, however, is the fact that often obscure local place-names of the cities of the world contribute almost as much to the texture of Haveth Childers Everywhere as do river-names to the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter. Again, there is especial emphasis on the "old city" of each of the cities alluded to, or to ancient features such as Brussels' Porte de Hal, all that remains of its medieval walls, or New York City's Palisades—not the New Jersey cliffs across the Hudson, but rather the wooden wall which guarded the north side of the original New Amsterdam. London appears in this section as the disorderly city where public hangings took place at Tyburn, now the site of Marble Arch, and Bristol appears as the city to whose burghers Henry II gave Dublin as a colony and which later became the center of the English slave-trade. In some other cases the ancient name of the capital is given: Tokyo appears under its old name of Yedo as well as under its modern name, and Addis Ababa appears only as the old Ethiopian capital, Entotto. All this esoteric geography should not, however, overwhelm the reader with wonder at the vast learning of the Wake; except in the case of Dublin, it is taken directly and almost entirely from the articles on individual cities in the Eleventh Britannica. Joyce's friend C. P. Curran said that "Joyce was many things, but he was certainly the last forty volumes of Thom~s Directories thinking aloud." Of Ulysses this is well said; of Finnegans Wake it might rather be said that it is often the Eleventh Britannica dreaming aloud. But toponymical arcana provide only the raw materials for what Haveth Childers Everywhere is finally about: the character HCE as a flawed Romulus, a touching mixture of guilty secrets, tipsy pride, and unmistakable nobility, the builder of a civilization measured both by its prisons and by its cathedrals.

—Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland! (456.07) 

The Dublin of Ulysses has usually been regarded as both literal and symbolic, not only an exact description of the historical Dublin of 1904 but also an emblem of modern urban life anywhere. And no doubt it is, but nothing in the book says that Dublin is Everycity. That reading belongs, perhaps inescapably, to what readers of Ulysses bring to it. The Dublin and also the Ireland of Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, are symbolic throughout, and the book tells us so at every opportunity, by conflating the names of Dublin and other Irish places with place-names from the rest of the world. Its principle is that what happens in Ireland happens everywhere; and what happens anywhere happens in Ireland too. The motif is announced on the first page of the book—even before the Fall—by the invocation of the Dublin which is the county seat of Laurens County, Georgia. In continuously inventive variations, the motif provides one of the primary toponymical patterns of the Wake. There are of course general metamorphoses of place in the Wake, as well as of persons: Dublin's Phoenix Park is Eden, as the scene of Earwicker's "fall" in the incident involving the two girls and the three soldiers, but also thanks to its eponymous bird it is the site of the Resurrection; and it is very often also Valhalla and the battlefield of Waterloo. 

These identities belong to the imaginative structure of the Wake, but there are also many conflations which count rather as exploitations of linguistic accident. It is not so much, that is, that they are individually significant as that in aggregate they display and reinforce over and over the Here and Everywhere pattern. Sometimes the Irish allusion is primary and the non-Irish locus is secondary; sometimes it is the other way around.

It is linguistic coincidence that the name "Balaclava" so closely resembles Dublin's Irish name, Baile Atha Cliath (pronounced something like "ballyacleeah"), but the Wake makes so much use of it that the Crimean War almost comes to seem an incident of Irish history (as for the Irish soldiers in the Crimea no doubt it was, whether they were aware of it or not). Less significant but among a surprisingly large number of Polish allusions is the conflation of Dublin with Lublin. Jokes, anagrams, charades keep proliferating. Dublin and Lublin trade only names initially; similar swaps have almost undetectable nuances. Poland is conflated in reverse with Dublin as "Poolland," a reminder that the name "Dublin" originally meant "black pool." Ireland itself combines as Erin with Iran, as the land of Finn MacCool with Finland, and as the New Ireland of the Free State with America's Irish nickname, the "New Island." Other conflations become increasingly esoteric.

The Dublin district of Crumlin of course pairs with Moscow's Kremlin, the area of northeast Dublin once known as Goose Green with Scotland's Gretna Green ("Goosna Greene," 533.19), Dublin's undistinguished street called Appian Way with its Roman namesake, and the Old Bailey on Howth, former site of the Bailey lighthouse, with London's criminal court. In the confused memories of the Four Old Men (387.09—.l0), four Dublin streets— Liffey, Aylesbury, Northumberland, and Anglesea—are indistinguishable from areas of Britain once ravaged by Vikings—who are named in the same sentence. Still other conflations sound like the amusing misperception of names by an ear attuned only to hearing Irish ones: Bulgaria is heard as Ballygarry, an otherwise not very important village, and the Balearic Islands as the Ballyhoura mountains, mixed up with the town Ballyhooly ("ballyhooric,"555.10). Even the famous name of London's Westminster is heard by this Irish ear as West Munster.

Louis O. Mink         A Finnegans Wake GAZETTEER

Dublin

Lublin

Somehow, echoing FW, The Wikipedia article on Lublin, Poland, is headed with the sentence:

Not to be confused with Dublin

Well may a simple substitution of the letter "L" for the letter "D" lead you to this Polish city on the river Vistula.

To quote from the already quoted GAZETTEER:

Less significant but among a surprisingly large number of Polish allusions is the conflation of Dublin with Lublin. Jokes, anagrams, charades keep proliferating. Dublin and Lublin trade only names initially; similar swaps have almost undetectable nuances. Poland is conflated in reverse with Dublin as "Poolland," a reminder that the name "Dublin" originally meant "black pool."

For the LODE & Re:LODE project, and for The Yellow House in Liverpool, these examples of "wordplay" have a greater significance. See the LODE Legacy page on the LODE & Re:LODE blog, and the LODE Legacy 2002 - Loop-Pool in particular.

Liverpool

The name of the city and port of Liverpool has a number of possible origins. Perhaps the name originates from the Old English lifer, meaning thick or muddy water, and pōl, meaning a pool or creek, and is first recorded around 1190 as Liuerpul. According to the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, "The original reference was to a pool or tidal creek now filled up into which two streams drained". The place appearing as Leyrpole, in a legal record of 1418, may also refer to Liverpool. Other origins of the name have been suggested, including "elverpool", a reference to the large number of eels in the Mersey while another such suggestion is derivation from Welsh llyvr pwl, apparently meaning "expanse or confluence at the pool".