About the park
In 1891 Robert G. Dunville gave a piece of ground on the Falls Road to the city of Belfast. It was the first public park in the city to be donated rather than bought, and it opened the following year, formally, by the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.
The Dunvilles were whiskey. Dunville & Co. of the Royal Irish Distilleries was, at its height, one of the largest whiskey concerns in the world, and the family put a great deal of that money back into west Belfast. Robert G. Dunville also gave land towards Falls Park, further up the same road, along with £5,000 for laying it out. Two of the best free green spaces in west Belfast came from one family and one industry.
The fountain was the point of the park. Dunville put £665 towards it and A. E. Pearce designed it — three tiers of buff terracotta in a circular pool, ornate to a degree that looks almost improbable now. In a district of dense terraced housing, a big public fountain giving out clean drinking water was not decoration. It was infrastructure that happened to be beautiful.
The park declined through the twentieth century along with everything else in that part of the city, and the fountain stopped running. The turn came with a major upgrade: £2 million from Belfast City Council, match-funded by the Department for Social Development, reopening the park in 2013 with a floodlit 3G pitch, an adventure playground, a running track, a changing pavilion and parking.
The fountain was kept, and given a new job. It no longer runs with water; instead the council fills the great terracotta basin with more than six and a half thousand flowers a year. It is not what it was built for. It is, however, still doing exactly what Dunville intended — being the best-looking thing on the Falls Road, free, for everybody.