In his novel A Land Not Theirs (1986) David Marcus writes that “All the way up to the statue of Fr. Mathew was one immense conflagration … a gigantic furnace.” Carried out by British troops in December 1920 in a reprisal for an IRA ambush near the then Victoria (now Collins) Barracks, this burning of Cork destroyed five acres of the city’s significant streets and properties. It is typical of Tom Spalding’s tone of mild speculation that he dares to wonder if, perhaps, the fires were good for the city.
The rebuilding and restoration which followed opened up the new science of town planning in Cork and introduces Spalding’s survey, its densely packed material focused on a single century of urban development. Essentially, it explains where communities live and work and why, and sometimes why not. No stranger to aspects of Cork’s built history, Spalding’s chapters offer compelling evidence garnered over decades of archival research, observation and local and personal affection. They should be read as a guide to the management of any Irish city; the occasionally repetitive detail only reinforces its universality.
This review must declare an interest as one of the minor anecdotal sources; Spalding’s use of such interviews is admirably woven into a progress through all the controversies from brewery to shrine, municipal estates and slum clearances, the old Sunbeam-Wolsey factory and the new Opera House.
It is a delight to find the little things recorded: the stained glass in an avenue of houses, an outbreak of Beaux Art or Art Deco, the retention of a snug in a popular pub, the stone embroideries of a monument. These endorse the dedicated investigation of an environment still familiar and the named architects, engineers, speculators and civic and church authorities who caused it to be made.
Throughout this book Spalding’s restrained enthusiasms divert into commentary, as with the class-defining significance of the parlour (lower) rather than the sittingroom (middle to upper) while his academic detachment is punctured by the frequent ironies in his documentation of contradictory certainties. Guided by the title Designed for Life, what elevates this survey above all is Spalding’s regard for the people of the city through the years of change and, still, decay. For such a weighty volume, it is somehow hard to put down.
