Cork City Hall

Stand on the far side of the south channel and look across at City Hall. A long pale limestone front, a clock tower, and the whole thing doubled in the water on a still day. It looks like it has been there for two hundred years. It has been there for ninety. The building that stood on this quay before it burned to the ground on the night of 11 December 1920, and the one you are looking at carries that night in every stone.

The night it burned

The old hall started life as the Corn Exchange in the 1840s, a plain trading floor for the grain merchants, and the city fathers took it over later in the century. On the night of 11 December 1920, during the War of Independence, British forces set fire to the centre of Cork in reprisal for an IRA ambush at Dillon's Cross. City Hall and the Carnegie Library next door went up together. The library held centuries of the city's written record, and by morning most of it was ash. The civic heart of Cork was a roofless shell, and the Lord Mayor who should have been inside it, Terence MacSwiney, had died on hunger strike in Brixton seven weeks before.

A gift, and a gesture

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

They did not build a modest replacement. The front runs the full length of the quay, the clock tower answers the church spires across the water, and behind the facade sits one of the biggest concert halls in the country. The choice was the point. The old building had been a converted corn store. The new one was built as a proper seat of government, a way of saying that the city's civic life had outlived the fire. It has held council debates, citizenship ceremonies, boxing matches and world tours ever since.

What to look for

If the doors are open, go in. The city arms are set into the floor of the entrance hall in mosaic, and you will find them again over the concert hall stage with the motto underneath: Statio Bene Fida Carinis, a safe harbour for ships. Outside on the quay there is a limestone plinth carrying the arms a third time, put up in 1985 for the eight hundredth birthday of Cork's first charter. Then cross the bridge and look back after dark, when the front is lit and the whole building floats on the channel.

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 sixteen years later.