I think that it is at least twenty years since I last visited Searsons.
The land around Ballsbridge was rural and mostly belonged to the Earl of Pembroke. After the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) moved into its present site near Ballsbridge in 1879, the Earl of Pembroke began to develop these lands into suburban residential housing. The RDS held their first show on their new premises in the early 1880s. In 1903 the lands formerly known as the ‘Forty Acres’ were given to the city by the Earl of Pembroke to establish Herbert Park. (The Earl of Pembroke’s surname was Herbert.) In 1907 the Dublin International Exhibition was held in Herbert Park.
HERBERT PARK AND NEARBY IN BALLSBRIDGE THE ROAD RATHER THAN THE PUBLIC PARK
Herbert Park is the name of a road and a public park in Ballsbridge, Dublin.
Ballsbridge (from historic Ball’s Bridge) is an affluent neighbourhood of Dublin. The area is largely north and west of a three-arch stone bridge across the River Dodder, on the south side of the city. The sign on the bridge still proclaims it as “Ball’s Bridge”, in recognition of the fact that the original bridge on that location was built and owned by the Ball family, a well-known Dublin merchant family in the 1500s and the 1600s.[1] The current bridge was built in 1791.
The bridge itself forms the heart of the Ballsbridge suburb which extends northwards towards the Grand Canal along Northumberland Road up to Haddington Road and Shelbourne Road, southwards along the Merrion Road towards Merrion and along Anglesea Road towards Donnybrook, and westwards to encompass the area around Pembroke Road, Clyde Road, Elgin Road and Herbert Park.
Herbert Park, a public park, is thirty-two acres in size and is divided by a road, also called Herbert Park, and forms part of Ballsbridge’s nebulous border with Donnybrook.
The Royal Dublin Society (RDS) has its grounds here, and the Lansdowne Road headquarters of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) is on the boundary between Ballsbridge and Irishtown. The corporate headquarters of Allied Irish Banks (AIB) are also located in Ballsbridge.
Ailesbury Road, along with adjacent Shrewsbury Road, contains the most expensive properties in Dublin, and the roads are featured in the Irish edition of the board-game Monopoly. Shrewsbury Road was the sixth most expensive street in the world in 2007.
Many of Dublin’s embassies and diplomatic residences are located in the southern part of Ballsbridge on and around Ailesbury Road. The British, American, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Israeli embassies are all located in the Ballsbridge area of Dublin.
The U.S. embassy, an iconic cylindrical building, is a major landmark in present-day Ballsbridge. It was designed in 1955 by John M. Johansen, Professor of Architecture at Yale University. The project was 9 years in incubation and the building was inaugurated in 1964.
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