Iveagh Play Centre
Published in Gems of Architecture, Issue 4 (July/August 2017), Volume 25Bull Alley Street, Dublin 8
By Niamh Marnham
The Iveagh Play Centre (1912–15), Bull Alley Street, Dublin, was an innovative school intended to complete the philanthropic vision of Edward Cecil Guinness (1847–1927), first earl of Iveagh. It, and the larger scheme of which it was part, provides a notable example of the power and reach of private philanthropy in poverty-riven late Victorian and early Edwardian Dublin.
Iveagh created a complex of housing, educational and health-improving facilities to replace tenement slums around St Patrick’s Cathedral. Known collectively as the ‘Bull Alley Complex’, it consisted of workmen’s housing, the workmen’s hostel Iveagh House, and the Iveagh Trust Public Baths. The Iveagh Markets were also intended as an integral part of the enclave. The last piece put in place was the Iveagh Play Centre: the aim was ‘to provide education with amusement, so that the two wants of children can be catered for’.
A site facing St Patrick’s Cathedral was selected and a limited architectural competition was held. The design chosen, by the Dublin firm McDonnell and Reid, has been described as ‘the most ambitious school building in the city … an exuberant and generously scaled essay in a Free Queen Anne idiom’. Laurence Aloysius McDonnell (1867/8–1925) had already enjoyed the patronage of the seventh earl of Aberdeen, lord lieutenant of Ireland, and his philanthropist wife, while together with Alexander William Douglas Reid he had recently completed the construction of Lord Iveagh’s son’s house, Glenmaroon, in Chapelizod.
Work began in October 1911 and the play centre, for children aged 3–14 living in the Patrick Street and Bride Street flats, opened in May 1915. The building was erected by McLaughlin and Harvey, Belfast, and cost £40,000.
Above: Fronting onto St Patrick’s Park, the Iveagh Play Centre is a grandiose edifice resembling a stately country house overlooking a formal garden. (NIAH)
Prominently fronting onto St Patrick’s Park (1901), the Iveagh Play Centre is a grandiose edifice resembling a stately country house overlooking a formal garden. Faced with vibrant Kingscourt red brick, the contrasting ‘white’ limestone dressings produce an eye-catching two-tone palette in contrast to sober St Patrick’s Cathedral. The centre-piece, a cupola-topped projecting breakfront, features a curvilinear gable, which can be interpreted as a nod to the ‘Dutch Billys’ once lining Dublin’s streets. Boldly modelled door-cases decorated with acanthus-detailed pulvinated friezes, scroll pediments, garlands and swags lead to the vestibules and classrooms. The Bull Alley Street front finishes in projecting ‘pavilions’ with Ionic pillars framing colonnaded polygonal bay windows. A beautifully carved modillioned cornice stretches across the façade, supporting scroll-footed ball finials on the corners of each projection. The conventional finish and historical architectural references mask an innovative framework, as the English Expanded Metal Company supplied metal for the fire-resistant reinforced concrete construction.
With bright, airy classrooms, the play centre also boasted an assembly hall-cum-concert hall and a gymnasium. It was open five evenings and one morning a week, and boys and girls learned subjects such as basket-weaving, dancing, gymnastics, needlework, painting and singing. The centre quickly earned the affections of the local children, who nicknamed it the ‘Bayno’ (beano or ‘free-for-all’) for the superior quality of its free buns and cocoa. Yet it was not just buns and cocoa that endeared the school to the children, and from the outset it was successful as a venue for practical education and social interaction. The Iveagh Play Centre closed in 1975; as the home of Liberties College, however, the tradition of education and entertainment continues for post-Leaving Certificate students.
Niamh Marnham is a Senior Built Heritage Consultant at Ove Arup & Partners. She is the author of the upcoming NIAH publication An introduction to the architectural heritage of Dublin South City (2017). Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, www.buildingsofireland.com.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.