A 200-year-old dedication to food

Cork's English Market is not just food and trinkets: it is community and history, writes Claire Davenport

In the 1960s plans for an ultra-modern office block threatened to rid Cork of a long established food market – a farming and trade legacy first established in 1778 and a site of tradition and community. Market Traders Association chairman Simon Flynn remarked: “I would consider it a closing chapter in my life.” The market traders and their loyal public hit back to preserve tradition and they won. Today the English Market is renowned for a fresh selection of produce, ranging from traditional drisheen, tripe and offal to traditional foods from France, Italy, North Africa and the Orient.
Serving a City: The Story of Cork's English Market is a comprehensive and visually powerful portrait of Cork's enduring English market. It chronicles the evolution of market culture in Cork from the earliest traces of mediaeval trade, predating physical monies in Cork's powerful monasteries to the modern abundance of the 21st century, steadfast to the onset of cultural and commercial homogenisation.
Old maps and etchings, dating from the 15th century, are testament to the great change and growth Cork has undergone in the past five centuries. In great historical detail Diarmuid and Donal O'Drisceoil document the early foundations of Cork City from the 12th century onwards, its evolution as a major trading port, the many markets that thrived there – corn, milk, meat and fish – the economic growth and prosperity of the 17th and 18th century to the fully-fledged officialdom of the English Market, manned by committed tradesmen, beadles, assistants, sweepers, watchmen and inspectors.
It serves as an immediate insight into early Cork society, the dirt, the filth, the poverty and its people, a people whose passionate participation in the market life is also captured as the founding families and friendly faces of the English market recount their earliest and most memorable days there.
Simon O'Flynn, of John O'Flynn & Sons, who worked there from the late 1950s until 1980, recalled how the culture of the place rarely changed, even since the 19th century, as he remembers the sawdust, the novelty of refrigeration and the office ladies with their high desks: “Unless you lived through those times, you don't understand Dickens.”