Cork’s Main Streets Collection

Cork’s Main Streets Collection

Cork city's North and South main Streets.

This collection of eight interviews concentrates on Cork City’s historic spine, North and South Main Streets. These streets link the island of the city centre with the North and South Sides of the city. They form a shopping and business area, which has also served a residential purpose down through the years. Although our broader collection contains much description of and stories from the area, these interviews (carried out between January and March 2015 and totalling 4 hours 28 minutes in duration) focus specifically on the streets, their past and their future. Interviewees include residents of the streets and their environs and those who work and have worked there, and the interviews encompass memories of the area from the 1940s onwards, descriptions of change in the area, and reflection on the area’s future. Interviews were carried out with local residents, one of whom is a local historian, representatives of three multi-generational family businesses (Leader’s clothing, the North Gate Pharmacy and Bradley’s Off-licence), a South Main Street resident and city planner, a cityscape historian, and a promoter who was particularly active in organising events in the nightclub Sir Henry’s in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Take a stroll down these streets using the interactive website developed by Penny Johnston: corksmainstreets.corkfolklore.org

Cork Civic Trust supported this interviewing project.

2014

Catalogue Numbers:

CFP_SR00536_oleary_2015; CFP_SR00537_hanover_2015; CFP_SR00538_spalding_2015; CFP_SR00539_hUigin_2015; CFP_SR00543_obrien_2015; CFP_SR00544_comber_2015; CFP_SR00545_leader_2015; CFP_SR00546_creedon_2015;

Cork City's North and South Main Streets.

Penny Johnston based a digital oral history mapping pilot project called ‘Cork’s Main Streets’ on the audio interviews from this collection in 2016, as part of her PhD research. The 2018 website and the map layer can be viewed at: http://corksmainstreets.corkfolklore.org/cms/

Penny’s PhD dissertation can be accessed at: https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/5469

Other Material Realating to Cork's Main Streets:

CFP_SR00448_hinchy_2012: Interview of ex-Beamish Brewery (South Main Street) staff member Ed Hinchy.

CFP_SR00532_davis_2014: Interview with former manager of The Other Place Resource Centre (South Main Street), Clive Davis, conducted by Stephen Dee and Dermot Casey, as part of the LGBT Archive Collection

CFP_SR00535_wilkins_2014: Mark Wilkins was interviewed by Aisling Byron on the music scene of Cork City in the 1980s and 1990s: the interview contains in-depth discussion of South Main Street music venue Sir Henry’s and of the South Main Street pub The Liberty.

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Cork Folklore Project


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

English

Audio

8 .wav files