Belvedere House

Great Denmark St runs northeast towards Mountjoy Sq and passes the 18th-century Belvedere House at No 6. This has been used as the Jesuit Belvedere College since 1841, and one James Joyce studied here between 1893 and 1898, describing it later in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The building is renowned for its magnificent plasterwork by the master stuccodore Michael Stapleton and for its fireplaces by the Venetian artisan Bossi, but the only chance you’ll get to admire these features is if you enrol for a class at this secondary school as the building is closed to the public. The plasterwork isn’t that special.