Richard Turner

Richard Turner was a Dublin ironfounder and builder, born around 1798 as a younger son of Timothy Turner, a merchant of Clare Street. The family had been ironmongers in Dublin since at least the mid-eighteenth century; Richard may have worked with his uncle, another Richard Turner, whose ironmongery at St Stephen's Green North he later inherited. He also built houses and sold them, and the proceeds helped him buy a large site at Ballsbridge for a foundry: the Hammersmith Ironworks opened in 1834 and specialised in glasshouses, with a partner named Walker handling the glazing until 1843. The firm took commissions across Britain and Ireland, and Turner opened premises in London in the mid-1840s. In 1856 a writer in The Builder called it the "one great manufacturing house" of a "slumbering metropolis"; Thomas Drew, writing in 1880, remembered Turner "in his vigorous days" as "ubiquitous", never short of daring and original projects, among them a channel tunnel in the form of a semicircular iron tube.

His curvilinear glasshouses join wrought-iron ribs to cast-iron tubes, giving curved structures of great lightness that the repeal of the glass taxes in the 1840s and advances in technique had made possible. At the Palm House of Belfast Botanic Gardens, designed by Charles Lanyon, Turner carried out the wrought-iron construction of the two wings, whose foundation stone was laid in 1839 and which were finished the following year; the central dome, by Young of Edinburgh, was not added until 1852. It ranks among the earliest examples of curvilinear construction in iron and glass. At Glasnevin, near Dublin, the Curvilinear Range of the National Botanic Gardens, raised between 1843 and 1848 and extended in 1869, has a central section built by Turner: the contractor Clancy, who won the tender ahead of him, put up the 1843 section, after which Turner carried on the later phases with Frederick Darley, architect to the Royal Dublin Society, and with his younger son William. The range is regarded as one of the finest glasshouses in Europe, for technical innovation and artistic quality alike.

At Kew, Turner and the architect Decimus Burton produced the Palm House (1844-1848) in disputed circumstances: Turner had submitted a design that Burton made him revise, and the building, related to the Belfast house, is the fruit of a collaboration. Nikolaus Pevsner saw in it "one of the boldest pieces of 19th-century functionalism in existence". The Dictionary of Irish Architects also lists Kew's Waterlily House (1852) among his works, though its listing record leans towards Burton, and his name is linked to the Temperate House, which rose in stages from the late 1850s to the end of the century, where his hand is less visible than Burton's. With Burton again he designed the Winter Garden in Regent's Park, London (1845-1846). He also made iron station roofs, at Broadstone in Dublin and at Lime Street in Liverpool (1847), and entered the competition for the 1851 exhibition building in London. The vinery at Turlough Park in County Mayo was built by the firm Richard Turner Engineers.

From 1857 John William Gibson was Turner's managing partner and the firm traded as Turner & Gibson until 1862; in 1863 his son William, who had run the smaller Oxmantown Foundry, took charge of both works. Richard stayed active until at least 1868, when he drew up plans to widen the wings of the Curvilinear Range at Glasnevin. He died on 31 October 1881, aged 83, and was buried with his wife, Jane Goodshaw, whom he had married around 1816, in the Turner family plot in Mount Jerome Cemetery. They had at least nine children, among them the architect Thomas Turner.