Hartstonge Street

Lower Hartstonge Street, LimerickGoogle Maps

Hartstonge Street is named after Sir Henry Hartstonge, an Anglo-Irish politician, and his wife Lady Lucy Hartstonge, who was renowned for her charitable work in Limerick, including the founding of St. John’s Hospital.
On this street sits the former Leamy School, the school that Frank McCourt – an Irish-American author renowned for his 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes – attended briefly in the 1940s.
This site was one of a number of city centre locations for artist Regina Corcoran’s (Ireland) work Alternative Gardens – an urban nature trail (2005), which guided people to locations where weeds were naturally occurring in the urban environment.
The artist described her intentions to ‘explore fracture points where nature and civilisation collide and overlap within the urban environment’. The work was designed to encourage ‘people to question their perception of value and order’ and ‘explore the potential of alternatives offered by a world largely disregarded as something quite separate to the human condition’.