The conversion of St Stephen’s Green from marshy commonage into ninety-six building plots captures a striking tension between municipal revenue, planned urban improvement and the loss of customary access. The article cautions against viewing the scheme through the later image of a Victorian park, emphasising instead its speculative, gradual and uneven beginnings. Its comparison with Londonderry’s port administration and Portmore’s demesne suggests a Restoration pattern: institutions and elites reshaped land and resources through control rather than conquest. How far should we interpret these projects as economic modernisation, and how far as mechanisms that intensified exclusion and access to shared spaces?