St Patrick's Street

Nobody calls it St Patrick's Street. It is Pana, and you do not walk it, you do Pana. Stand at the Statue at the top and look down the length of it and you will notice something odd for a main street: it bends. That curve is a river. Until the 1780s this was a tidal channel of the Lee with boats tied up along both sides, and the merchants' houses you can still see above the shopfronts were built facing the water. The city arched the channel over, paved it, and the quay became the street. The Lee is still down there.

A street built on water

Cork grew up on a cluster of marshy islands with channels running between them, and most of the streets in the flat of the city are old waterways with a lid on. Pana is the widest and the grandest of them, and the buried river gives it both its gentle bow and its generous width. Look at the shop fronts on the north side and count the ones with the bowed Georgian windows on the upper floors. Those are the merchant houses that fronted the quay before there was a street at all.

For two hundred years this has been where Cork shows itself off. The butter and provisions money built the tall premises, the finest shops in Munster traded behind the windows, trams ran the length of it, and the pavements were made wide for parading as much as for buying. The street keeps that double life today. It is the busiest run of shops in the city and it is also the stage: a protest sets out from here, a winning team is welcomed home here, and when something matters in Cork, this is where people come to stand. The bend hides the far end as you walk, so Pana always seems to promise a little more around the corner.

The night the street burned

The worst night in the street's history was 11 December 1920. During the War of Independence, British forces set fire to building after building along the south side of Pana in reprisal for an IRA ambush that afternoon. Firemen who turned out found their hoses cut. By morning most of the south side was gone, along with City Hall and the Carnegie Library across the river. Then Cork did something quieter. It rebuilt. Within seven years the burned blocks were standing again in the confident 1920s commercial style you walk past today, and if you look up above the shopfronts on the south side you can still read the join between the old street and the new.

The Statue, and doing Pana

At the top of the street, where it meets the bridge, stands the figure everyone in Cork calls the Statue. It is Father Theobald Mathew, the temperance priest, unveiled in 1864 and pointing down Pana ever since. If you arranged to meet someone in Cork in the last hundred and fifty years, this is where you met them. Then you did Pana together, down one side and back up the other, to see and be seen. The shops change and the chains come and go. The habit is older than any of them.

On the walk

We walk the length of Pana and read the street like a map of the city's luck: the buried river under the curve, the merchant windows above the shops, the Statue at the head, and the rebuilt blocks that show you where the fire of 1920 stopped.