After last Monday’s report on the present unhappy state of the Iveagh Markets (see A Preposterous State of Affairs « The Irish Aesthete), here are some images of another initiative undertaken in the late 19th/early 20th centuries by Edward Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh. The Iveagh Trust buildings comprise a series of eight four-storey blocks north of St Patrick’s Cathedral, an area of Dublin which until then had been a warren of lanes and alleys, judged to be ‘centuries deep in filth.’ All this was swept away in the early 1890s for the construction of new housing for some 250 families, designed by Joseph & Smithem in red brick with terracotta used for details such as date stones. Subsequently in 1913, Guinness commissioned the Iveagh Play Centre on Bull Alley Street, designed by McDonnell & Reid, once again in red brick but with extensive use of Portland stone in what might be described as a Queen Anne-inspired idiom. Built at a cost of £38,000, by 1915 the school was attended by 900 children. However, declining attendances and mounting costs eventually led to its closure and in 1976 the building was sold to the Dublin Vocational Educational Committee; today it houses Liberties College which offers further education courses to people in the area.