Cork City Hall

Cork City Hall faces the south channel of the Lee at Albert Quay, its limestone front and clock tower mirrored in the water. The building looks older than it is. The first city hall on this stretch burned to the ground on the night of 11 December 1920, and the one that took its place carries that night in its stone.

The night it burned

The original hall began life as a corn exchange and opened to the public as Cork's city hall around 1903. On 11 December 1920, during the War of Independence, British forces known as the Black and Tans set fire to the centre of the city in reprisal for an IRA ambush. City Hall and the Carnegie Library next door went up together. With the library went much of Cork's written record, centuries of it, lost in a single night. By morning the civic heart of the city was a roofless shell.

A gift, and a gesture

Rebuilding needed money the young Irish state did not have. The cost came instead from the British government in the 1930s, offered as a gesture of reconciliation for the destruction of 1920. A design competition went to the Dublin architects Alfred Jones and Stephen Kelly, and Éamon de Valera laid the foundation stone on 9 July 1932. The Cork firm Sisk raised the new hall in pale limestone over the next four years. De Valera came back to open it on 8 September 1936.

The hall they raised is deliberately grand. A long limestone front runs the length of the quay, broken by a clock tower that answers the spires across the water, and behind it sits one of the largest concert halls in the country. The choice mattered. Where the old building had begun as a plain corn exchange, the new one was built as a proper seat of government, proof that the city's civic life had outlived the fire. De Valera, who laid the stone and opened the doors, would lead the country for much of the next twenty years. The hall behind that front has carried council debates, citizenship ceremonies and concerts ever since, and on a summer evening the whole pale building floats in the water of the south channel.

What to look for

City Hall is the seat of Cork City Council and the grandest civic room in the city. Its concert hall has held everything from council debates to touring orchestras and world tours. Look down in the entrance and you find the city arms set in mosaic, with the same arms above the concert-hall stage and the motto Statio Bene Fida Carinis, a safe harbour for ships. Outside stands a limestone plinth added in 1985 for the eight hundredth year of Cork's first charter, carrying the arms once more.

On the walk

We stop across the channel from City Hall and tell the story the building keeps quiet: the fire of 1920, the records that burned with the library beside it, and the strange peace by which the hall was rebuilt with British money four years later.