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 pulled in well over a million visitors a season to a town of eighty thousand people. When it closed, the pavilions came down and the city kept the ground. It is Fitzgerald's Park now, and you can still see the exhibition in it if you know where to look.

One man's idea

The exhibition was the work of Edward Fitzgerald, Lord Mayor of Cork in 1901 and 1902, a builder by trade with a builder's confidence. He put the idea to the city in February 1901 and then drove it through as chairman of the committee, raising the money, arguing with the objectors and laying the foundation stone himself. On eight hectares of drained marshland by the river he put up an Edwardian fairground of culture and industry: a fine arts gallery, a machinery hall, an industrial hall, a concert hall and a Canadian pavilion shipped across the Atlantic. It was a statement, a small city at the edge of an empire announcing that it could stage something on a grand scale, and it opened on 1 May 1902.

Chutes, switchbacks and Turkish Delight

Cork came for the fun as much as the exhibits. A water chute, the one in the photograph at the top of this page, dropped boats down a ramp into the Lee to a soaking and a cheer. There was a switchback railway, a skating rink, a shooting gallery, an aquarium and a helter-skelter. A temperance restaurant fed the crowds, a nod to Father Mathew's city, and plenty of people walked straight past it. One stallholder, an Armenian confectioner called Harutun Batmazian trading as Hadji Bey, launched the Turkish Delight that Cork would go on buying for the next eighty years. In August 1903 King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came to see it all, and the city turned out in its hats.

For a small city 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.

The park it left

The exhibition closed for good at the end of October 1903. Rather than let the site go back to the developers, the organisers used the profits to buy the grounds and the house on them, the Shrubberies, and handed the lot to the people of Cork. The land opened as Fitzgerald's Park in 1906, named for the Lord Mayor who dreamed the whole thing up, and it is still the city's favourite public garden, with the river on one side and the Shaky Bridge at the end of it. The Shrubberies became the Cork Public Museum in 1945, and the pavilion Fitzgerald built stands on the lawn yet, the last piece of the fair still in place.

On the walk

Fitzgerald's Park sits a short walk west of our route, along the Mardyke. 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. It is the best place in the city for a sit-down afterwards.