Located just to the North of O’Connoll St., Rutland Square (renamed Parnell Square in 1933 in honour of Charles Stewart Parnell who once lived there) was the first Georgian Square in the city, developed between c.1755-1795, as a series of residential terraces enclosing the grounds to the north of the Rotunda Hospital

It is difficult for us now to imagine just how magnificent Parnell Square once was, before the encroachment of extensions to the Rotunda hospital in the 1940s, and the development of the Garden of Rememberence in the 1960s. Once, at its centre were a bowling green, lantern-lined walks, obelisks, a coffee room and terraces riding up the slope towards an Orchestra at the center of Palace Row, now Parnell Square north.
Undoubtedly it rivalled any of the later Georgian squares on the southern side of the Liffey.

The square came about further to the establishment in 1749 of the New Pleasure Gardens. The gardens, designed by Robert Stevenson, acted as a fundraising enterprise of the Rotunda Hospital’s founder Dr Bartholomew Mosse, who attracted patronage through annual subscriptions and events held in the grounds.

The maternity hospital was designed by the great Richard Castle, and opened on the 8th December 1757, the first charitable lying-in hospital in the country.

The hospital complex was added to with the construction of the Rotunda entertaining room in 1764 (now the Ambassador) to designs by John Ensor. In 1784 construction began on the Assembly Rooms, to designs by Richard Johnston, now the Gate Theatre.

The success of the Pleasure Gardens resulted in the development of the surrounding lands, with plots being laid out from the mid-1700s. Soon Rutland Square became one of the city’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. You can read some contemporary descriptions of the area in an interesting article by the Mapping Dubliners Project here

The townhouses surrounding the square contain some of the best examples of 18th-century interiors and decorative plasterwork in the city, many of which remain largely unaltered since their construction.

The huge scale of these houses has allowed many of them to be adapted over time to a variety of uses including hotels, offices, schools and cultural institutions such as the wonderful The Hugh Lane gallery and the Dublin Writer’s Museum.

I hope to get access at some stage to document the interiors of some of these buildings, including the Rotunda itself, and will include them here when I get around to it.

Recently a significant amount of work was carried out with the intention to create a Cultural Quarter at Parnell Square, which would see the construction of a new city library, a 200-seat conference centre, a music centre, education facilities and a café and exhibition spaces across the northern end of the square.

The scheme also was to include the creation of a new public plaza at Parnell Square North, and the restoration of some of the finer Georgian houses, including the former Coláiste Mhuire, Christian Brothers school, in what was to be a catalyst for the regeneration of the north inner city.

The project, however, seems now to have stalled due to soaring construction costs. There have also been long protracted discussions regarding the construction of a national maternity hospital, and moving the services of the Rotunda elsewhere as part of a re-organisation of maternity services in Dublin.

Were this to happen, the Rotunda perhaps be adapted to cultural usage and the park area cleared and restored, I could imagine a time where the Georgian splendour of Parnell Square could one day be back on full display.