The English Market

The English Market has been feeding Cork for more than two hundred years. The city corporation opened it in 1788 and it has traded every week since, through famine, war, fire and recession, which makes it one of the oldest covered markets still working anywhere in Europe. The name confuses visitors now as much as it did then. In a city that built its whole personality on not being English, calling the market English takes some explaining, and we get asked about it on nearly every walk.

Why "English"

The name came from the people who built it. In 1788 the Corporation of Cork was run by Church of Ireland Protestants, the families locals called the English interest, and the market they built was theirs. The Catholic traders of the city had their own market, the Irish Market, on Cornmarket Street a few minutes away. The Irish one closed in the last century. The English one kept going, and the name it had been given to tell the two apart simply stuck to the survivor. Nobody in Cork has ever taken it to mean the food.

What you find there

The market sits on two levels joined by a gallery above the lower floor. The lower level, the original 1788 section, runs down toward Princes Street and holds the older trades: the butchers, the fishmongers, the counters loaded with local cheese and cured meat. The upper section, added in the nineteenth century, runs in from the Grand Parade under a high timber roof. In the middle of it all is the fountain, which has stood there in one form or another since the early 1800s and is the spot everyone arranges to meet at.

The Cork specialities are still here and still odd. Spiced beef, a dry-cured joint rubbed with spices and slow-cooked, is a Christmas dish everywhere else in Ireland and a year-round staple in Cork. Drisheen is a pale blood pudding made with sheep's blood, cream and breadcrumbs, boiled and served with tripe, and it tastes like nothing else on the island. Buttered eggs, rubbed with butter while still warm from the hen to seal the shell before anyone had a fridge, are still sold at a couple of stalls. Ask the trader why. They enjoy the question.

The 2011 visit

On 20 May 2011 Queen Elizabeth II walked through the market during the first visit by a British monarch to independent Ireland. It was not on the original plan. A Palace adviser had seen the place on a scouting trip and asked for it, and the market got a few days' notice. She walked the aisles, spoke to the traders, and stopped at Pat O'Connell's fish stall, where he told her a joke about a monkfish and she laughed out loud. The Queen at a fish counter in Cork, surrounded by traders who looked entirely at home, went around the world in an afternoon, and Pat has been telling the story ever since. Plenty of people in Cork had mixed feelings about the visit itself. The market treated it as what it was, a visit from someone interested in the food, and changed nothing for the cameras.

The building

The market you walk through today is mostly Victorian. The grand entrance on the Grand Parade, with its arches and its clock, went up in 1862 to the design of Sir John Benson, the man who also built St Patrick's Bridge, and the cast iron columns and high windows inside give the place a light that no renovation has managed to ruin. It has had close calls. The Burning of Cork in December 1920 stopped a few metres short of it. A fire in 1980 gutted a large part of it and there was serious talk of knocking the rest down for a car park. The city said no, rebuilt it, and reopened it in 1986. Several stalls have been in the same family for four or five generations, and some of the people serving you learned the trade from a grandparent behind the same counter.

On the walk

We pass the market entrance on the Grand Parade and go in when the group and the crowds allow. We explain the name, the specialities and the visit that put it on the map in 2011. If you want to do it properly, give it an hour of its own before or after the walk. It opens Monday to Saturday, and the gallery café upstairs is the best seat in the city for watching Cork do its shopping.