A time to celebrate Cork’s glorious history

THE 2023 Cork Heritage Open Day is taking place on Saturday, August 12. For one day only, more than 40 buildings open their doors free of charge for this special event.

The team behind the Open Day - Cork City Council and building owners - have grouped the buildings into general themes, ‘Steps and Steeples’, ‘Customs and Commerce’, ‘Medieval to Modern’, ‘Saints and Scholars’, and ‘Life and Learning’ - one can walk the five trails to discover a number of buildings within these general themes, or pick and choose buildings you want to explore.

Cork Heritage Open Day is organised by Cork City Council as part of Heritage Week, in partnership with the Heritage Council, and with media sponsorship from The Echo and Cork’s 96FM. This event is organised almost entirely on a voluntary basis, with building owners, local historians and communities giving their time free of charge.

Its success lies with the people behind the buildings, who open their doors willingly every year to allow the public a glimpse of the amazing and unique built heritage of Cork city. Without the generosity of the building owners, this event would not happen.

I have often marvelled about how this city is built on a swamp - a fantastic piece of engineering in itself. I marvel at the city’s human built fabric - its ‘higgledy-piggledy’ architecture - and how the buildings sit on timber foundations, almost sitting in a basin, crawling out as though to grab its hilly suburbs, to make sure it doesn’t completely sink.

Walking around the city, researching, and photographing, I am often taken by a number of things, which have come to mind in participating in Heritage Open Day over the years.

Cork city’s evolution can be told as an unfolding succession of stories - various people coming and going down the ages, leaving their own mark through architecture on the city and region.

Every few metres, Cork’s landscape changes. It always surprises, offering ever new vistas and new stories. The curvature in the cityscape - its colours and shapes - constantly seem to frustrate the eye anxious for symmetry or linear simplicity.

The city’s architectural components combine to create a strong sense of place, emotional attachment and identity. That place-making can be sometimes located in physical space, and at other times in the mind.

Cork’s urban landscape is pulsing with messages about the past, present and future. This throbbing or energy - with all its tensions, flows, complexities, even down to the look of the city’s public realm, cogwheels of traffic and people movement - all create the momentum to drive the city on.

I also like to stop on St Patrick’s bridge to admire how the houses in Gurranabraher are set into the steep hillside of Cork’s northside, but this urban landscape, since the first social housing unit opened in 1934, has been re-interpreted by each generation of viewers - from originally being a statement on Free State Ireland to being a proud and resilient place.

I am a big fan of the city’s 34 bridges - from the elegant Georgian stonework of Parliament Bridge to the Victorian ironwork on bridges such as St Vincent’s Bridge - all evoke a sense of time and are illustrated histories of a moment in history - many of which we know the basic history about, and sometimes that’s all that has survived.

I also enjoy the view of the brick work when an old building has to be taken down. The multiple bricks and limestone and sandstone used, laying neatly but almost randomly on top of each other, give one access to the imagination and efforts of the people who drew up their design, the people who had sleepless nights thinking about their work, and the people, the actual workers, who strived hard and long to bring and weave the jigsaw pieces of an architect’s imagination together.

And with all my strong wishes for someone to invent a time machine so I can travel back to meet the architects and builders of the past about the above ideas, I cannot. So I can’t walk the medieval town walls of Cork with the first Mayor of Cork Richard Wine, or walk around Cork’s 18th century canals with map maker John Rocque, or speak to someone like William Burges, architect of St Finbarr’s Cathedral. But we are lucky that a large suite of historical documents have survived to tell the story of some of our most beautiful buildings.

There is a strong importance in minding our rich built heritage. Cork Heritage Open Day helps us, yes, in understanding and celebrating our Cork identity and sense of place, but also continues the dialogue around the importance of broadening the thinking on Irish architecture - its history and its future - and the importance of creating a new interested audience on not just the past but also future architecture.

Organised by Cork City Council, Cork Heritage Open Day takes place on Saturday, August 12, and more than 30 historic and heritage buildings will open their doors to the public for free.

Guided walking historic tours, exhibitions on the history of Cork, and a series of talks celebrating the built heritage and people of Cork will also take place.

See www.corkheritageopenday.ie