In 1862 The Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company Limited was established with a capital of £50,000 by three men, the Duke of Leinster, Lord Talbot de Malahide and Benjamin Lee Guinness. The purpose of this body was to provide ‘an institution to afford, to the people of Dublin and its neighbourhood, rational amusement blended with instruction and thus supply a want long felt in the city.’ To this end, it intended to erect a building ‘of an ornamental and appropriate character, which would comprise a Winter Garden adorned with the choicest plants and exotics, and which would also be used for the exhibition of horticulture – for promenades – musicales, when required – a concert hall suitable for the largest concerts and for the production of the works of the most eminent Masters – a gallery for the exhibition and sale of pictures and articles of vertu – a department for the display of manufacturers and useful arts – a polytechnic museum and theatre for lectures on popular subjects, and especially on the natural and mechanical sciences.’ There would also be a public bazaar, reading rooms, refreshment rooms, gymnasium and so forth, all of which were to be located amidst ornamental pleasure grounds. From this proposal emerged the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures held in Dublin in 1865. A similar event had taken place in the city twelve years earlier when the railway entrepreneur and philanthropist William Dargan had underwritten the Great Industrial Exhibition held on Leinster Lawn. This time, the location was a 17 acre site running from Earlsfort Terrace and Harcourt Street, with Hatch Street to the south and the rear of houses on St Stephen’s Green to the north. In the 18th century, much of this land, an uncultivated piece of ground, had been owned by Joseph Leeson, first Earl of Milltown, and was known as Leeson’s Fields. Later, it passed into the hands of John Scott, Lord Chief Justice and eventually first Earl of Clonmell, whose town residence on Harcourt Street was just across the way from an entrance to the grounds: while he used this as a private garden (accessed via a tunnel under Harcourt Street), in 1810 his son sold the place and some years after, it was open to the public as the Coburg Gardens. Half a century later, by which time they had fallen into disrepair, the gardens were bought by Benjamin Lee Guinness and when the Dublin Exhibition Palace and Winter Garden Company Limited was set up in 1862, he sold the site to it for the same price he had paid.
With the main buildings designed by Dublin architect Alfred Gresham Jones, the International Exhibition was opened in May 1865 by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and before closing six months later had received some 956,000 visitors. In 1870, two of Benjamin Lee’s sons, Edward (later Lord Ardilaun) and Arthur (later Lord Iveagh) re-acquired both the buildings and grounds behind them from the exhibition company, and while the site was used for another such venture in 1872, otherwise the gardens once more became private. As for the buildings, the vast iron and glass Winter Gardens were sold in 1882 and shipped to London where they were re-erected and opened to the paying public as the Albert Palace. Sadly, this venture proved a financial failure and within a few years the palace had closed down and was demolished before the end of the century. The other buildings were sold by Edward Guinness in 1883 to the Commissioners of Public Works to be adapted for the new Royal University. An architectural competition was held in 1912 for University College Dublin, with Rudolf Maximilian Butler selected as the winning entrant. His stripped-back Greek Revival design, with towering Ionic columns in the central breakfront and end pavilions, now conceals the earlier complex of the 1865 exhibition. Later vacated by University College Dublin, the Great Hall was adapted by the OPW in 1981 as the auditorium of the National Concert Hall. Meanwhile, as mentioned, the gardens to the rear remained the property of the Guinness family, whose Dublin residence, Iveagh House, stood on St Stephen’s Green (see In No Way Averse to the Magnificence of Life « The Irish Aesthete). When that building was presented to the Irish government by the second Earl of Iveagh in May 1939, so too were the gardens to the rear, on the understanding that ‘they remain intact as a lung for the city.’
The Iveagh Gardens, as they are now known, were designed by Ninian Niven, a well-known landscape gardener and former Director of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Born in Glasgow, in 1827 Niven was offered the position of head gardener of the grounds of the official residence of the chief secretary for Ireland in the Phoenix Park, Dublin: here he remained until appointed to the Botanic Gardens in 1834. He left that position after four years to establish his own highly successful nursery as well as designing the gardens of a number of Irish country houses. When it came to the grounds of the International Exhibition grounds, Niven opted for a style that mixed French and English traditions, a blend of formality and informality that allowed him to include a variety of different elements within a single space. On the north side of the site, for example, is a sunken lawn with a drop of five feet that originally served as an archery field, a rare surviving example of this once popular feature. On the south side, meanwhile, can be found both a rosarium and a Yew maze, the latter being a miniature copy of the one at Hampton Court, London. Between these lies a central walk, with fountains on either side and, at the west end, a cascade that flows over a rockery incorporating stones from each of Ireland’s 32 counties. The west end, abutting what is now the National Concert Hall, has an American gardens, replete with walks through specimen trees and past what remains of statuary first placed here for the International Exhibition. While these grounds were much used while University College Dublin was based in Earlsfort Terrace, from the late 1960s onwards its campus moved to a new site at Belfield, south of the city centre, the gardens were largely forgotten and overlooked. In 1991, they were placed under the management of the Office of Public Works (OPW) and opened to the public in 1992, with the cascade restored in 1996, and a new entrance on the south side, opened on Upper Hatch Street in 2003. Today, the Iveagh Gardens are a popular destination for office workers in this part of Dublin, but there are still times, especially soon after the gates open, when it is possible to walk around the grounds alone except for ghosts of the past.
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