Since the formation of the United Kingdom, several places have been described as the "second city". Aristocrat-dominated Georgian Dublin was the second-most populous city at the time of the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801 (it was also the fifth-most populous in Europe), and was often described as the second city of the UK. Though it lost that position towards the end of the 19th century as the empire's Victorian cities grew through more rapid industrialisation, this was ultimately rendered moot when Dublin, and the rest of what would become after partition the Republic of Ireland, became independent of the UK in the 1920s.