Abstract
Cork city has had quite a wait to be included in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) series, its atlas coming long after the cities of Dublin and Belfast have been amply served. But the publication of the Cork fascicle, the thirty-first in a series that began with the modest set of maps for Kildare in 1986, is more than a box ticked or a modest milestone in what has been a remarkable project, for this truly sumptuous pack of historical material promises to have a direct impact both on the study of Cork's complex past and on planning for its potentially perilous future.
As with all IHTA fascicles, the organisation of the Cork atlas reflects the origins of the project as conceived by the International Commission for the History of Towns in 1965 – a great post-war endeavour to plot the topographical development of European towns over the last millennium, with the ground rules as developed for the first fascicles still in evidence. In every IHTA the cartographic centre piece has been a specially commissioned large-scale map of the city or town as it existed as close as possible to 1840, drawing on the extraordinary (and heretofore unpublished) town plans then being produced by the Ordnance Survey, and supplemented by the maps being compiled by the Valuation Office around the same time. Smaller-scale maps based on Ordnance Survey revisions (in the case of Cork City, for 1926–7 and c.2021) complement the handsome master map. These maps share space in the Cork atlas with thirty other maps (some of recent vintage but most historic), with the earliest map apparently presenting the layout of the small walled town as of 1545. Twelve of the later maps relate specifically to the seventeenth century, five to the eighteenth and twelve to the nineteenth century. Nearly every map is printed in full colour and in at least one case (that drawn by Wolfgang Romer c.1690) is published here for the first time.
As a collection produced to exceptionally high design specifications this sheaf of maps is a truly tantalising assemblage that invites intense perusal, whether by teacher, student, researcher or anyone interested in Cork's built heritage. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that in the weeks after publication the Atlas appeared (briefly) on the Irish best-sellers list. What undoubtedly helped its enthusiastic reception was the online publication some months previously of The Digital Atlas of Cork/Corcaigh, a freely available interactive map which was built using all the data collected for the Cork atlas; this can be searched by street and date and by economic, social or religious function and is a remarkably accessible resource that allows users to search across the city's more than 800 streets for particular buildings and other urban features that existed at any point up to 1900 – for example, allowing us to pin down the precise location of every Cork public house and tavern before and after Father Mathew's temperance crusade. There have been older digital initiatives by the IHTA drawing on maps produced in the Derry/Londonderry and Galway atlases, but this Cork Digital Atlas, funded by the Heritage Council, has far wider application and will significantly increase the impact of the hard-copy atlas.
There is of course what seems at first sight to be a precursor to all this, a competitor volume: the Atlas of Cork City (2005), edited by J. S. Crowley et al, a tome of almost equal weight (literally). It includes many of the same historic maps of the city (reproduced there on a much smaller scale) and it also ranges over the millennium-long history of the city. But it is very different – a glorious smorgasbord of short essays by fifty-nine contributors, principally geographers, archaeologists and historians, all working within a very relaxed editorial template. Here in the IHTA the template is tight and the two editors are in complete control, contributing a remarkably concise introductory essay on the city's development (pp. 1–30) and a vast inventory, the ‘Topographical Information’ (pp. 30–204) of over six thousand city features (streets, churches, infrastructure, work places, public spaces etc.), all of which precedes the forty loose sheets – the maps, plans, contemporary images and photographs of the city.
The editors’ introductory essay is something of a tour de force; it draws on the findings of the other atlases in the IHTA series and provides a refreshingly continent-wide perspective, yet it is judicious in its detailed topographical analysis and measured in its conclusions. Its particular strengths are in tracing the opaque evolution of the medieval town, drawing primarily on archaeological evidence (two-fifths of the essay focuses on pre-sixteenth-century developments) and, secondly, in reconstructing the exceptional growth of the city in the century up to the first Ordnance Survey, an era of unrivalled commercial map-making of the city – and of unrivalled commercial prosperity.
That story, the economic processes that underlay the city's physical expansion, is of course not the primary concern here, but the editors are fully aware of the city's long cycles of commercial (and industrial) growth and decline. But it is a limitation of the project that the agents of physical change, the ground landlords, the speculators, the builders and the contractors, are rarely invoked. It may be hoped that with the plans for the digitisation of the Registry of Deeds it will become possible to use the Atlas and the Registry together to reconstruct this development process, particularly for the eighteenth century when major decisions on the reclamation and utilisation of land to the east of the old walled town were being made by private developers, the somewhat occluded decisions that shaped the modern heart of Cork city.
A second limitation is the absence of any spatial data on the religious make-up of the city. Admittedly this would be quite challenging to plot spatially before the 1830s, but it is of real importance if we are to decipher neighbourhood boundaries in the old city, for there was an unusual degree of religious segregation from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries (the island parishes versus the north and south suburbs). This issue has been addressed by others, notably by Patrick O’Flanagan in the 2005 Atlas of Cork City (pp. 156–8) but here, while there is an excellent inventory as to the appearance (and disappearance) of churches, chapels, religious houses and meeting houses around the city, the implications of their spatial patterns are left for others to tease out.
The terms of reference of the Atlas project also restrict it to the site of the historic urban area, not including the outer suburbs, the satellite villages or Cork Harbour at large. This is entirely understandable, but just as the IHTA has moved into the Dublin suburbs with supplementary volumes on Clontarf, Rathmines and more to come, so in the case of Cork one would hope something as rigorously organised and physically attractive as the present work will someday be done for ‘greater Cork’. The case for doing this is a strong one, for so much of merchant capital that was accumulated in city trade was invested not within the civic space but outside it, whether productively as in the industrial villages surrounding the city (Douglas, Ballincollig, Glasheen, Glanmire, etc.), or in the remarkable pattern of conspicuous architectural consumption overlooking Cork Harbour: by the 1830s there were at least 180 villa residences to the east and west of the city, nearly all of which were built with city money.