The Cork Exhibition

For two summers at the turn of the century, Cork threw itself a world's fair. The Cork International Exhibition of 1902 and 1903 rose on reclaimed marsh by the Mardyke, a temporary city of pavilions, machinery halls and pleasure rides that drew nearly four million visitors over its two seasons. When it closed, it left the city its finest park.

One man's idea

The exhibition was the work of Edward Fitzgerald, Lord Mayor of Cork in 1901. He put the idea to the city in February of that year, then drove it through as chairman of the organising committee. On eight hectares of drained marshland by the river he built an Edwardian fairground of culture and industry: a fine arts gallery, a machinery hall, an industrial hall and a Canadian pavilion shipped across the Atlantic. It was a statement, a small city announcing that it could stage something on a grand scale.

Chutes, switchbacks and Turkish Delight

Cork came for the fun as much as the exhibits. A water chute dropped boats into the Lee. There was a switchback railway, a skating rink, a shooting gallery and an aquarium. A temperance restaurant fed the crowds, a nod to Father Mathew's city. One stallholder, Hadji Bey, launched the Turkish Delight that Cork would buy for the next eighty years. In 1903 King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came to see it, and the city turned out for them.

For a small city at the edge of an empire, it was a bold thing to attempt. Cork was no London or Paris, yet it built halls, laid out gardens, dammed part of the river for the boats, and persuaded the world to send exhibits and the king to come and look. The Edwardian years were a confident moment for the city, before the war and the burning that lay ahead, and the exhibition caught that mood exactly. People remembered it for the rest of their lives as the summer Cork put on a show, and a good many of them never forgot their first taste of Hadji Bey's Turkish Delight.

The park it left

The exhibition closed at the end of October 1903, having drawn around two million visitors that second year. Rather than let the site go, the organisers used the profits to buy the grounds and a house called the Shrubberies, and gave them to the people of Cork. The land became Fitzgerald's Park, named for the Lord Mayor who dreamed the whole thing up, and it is still the city's largest public garden. The pavilion he built stands there yet.

On the walk

Fitzgerald's Park sits a short walk west of our route. We tell the story of the two summers Cork built itself a world's fair, and the park it kept when the pavilions came down.