"A footprint of the past," says Cork's City Architect as we stand in the nave of what was once St. Peter's Church and is now an EU-funded "Vision Centre". Neil Hegarty believes that the role of City Architect carries with it the obligation to push out the architectural boundaries, but it still comes as something of a surprise to discover that the footprint consists of a door-shaped arch behind which a number of corpses have been buried.
St. Peter's was closed for worship in 1950, but the earliest maps show a church here in the North Main Street just as they show Christ Church in the South Main Street. Together these two streets form the ancient spine of the "ville of Corke", an outline still distinguishable in aerial photographs and unmistakable on contemporary maps. The modern city has grown to the east and south of this grid which was once bounded by the city walls and traversed by a waterway which is now Castle Street.
Programme of restoration
In the last 20 years, development - hospital extensions, a shopping centre and car-park, municipal housing - has encroached more and more on what was part of the Marsh of Cork. At the same time the North Main Street, especially, retained its own personality as a busy shopping street, ending in one direction at the North Gate Bridge and at the other at the legal districts of Washington Street, and thence to the commercial heart of the city at the Grand Parade and Patrick Street. In an enterprise supported by the European Commission, Cork Corporation initiated a programme of restoration and protection of the historic core of the city, centring on the North and South Main Streets; since then commerce, in the shape of new retail and parking developments, and history, in the shape of archaeological exploration, have gone hand in hand in a programme of renewal and conservation.
Regeneration strategies which include traffic management, tourism forecasts and land-use studies are inevitably part of any such complex undertakings, but here at St. Peter's Church the bureaucracy of change has solidified into simple, light-filled space. A wall plaque may remind us that Zachary Cook died in 1707; the two cherubs guarding the memorial to Mary Hartstongue, daughter of Captain Roger Bretteridge and dead at 18 in 1674, may still have the gilt on their grieving wings, but the vision to be beheld within these walls now is of the future rather than the past.
The entire floor space is taken up with two installations. One is a long, glass-walled gallery with steel supports and timber flooring and seating for one hundred people, reached by stairs and an open-topped lift for disabled access, designed to accommodate exhibitions and lectures with connections for video conferencing. It is, says Neil Hegarty, a high-tech solution to issues of fire-safety in that it allows immediate access to ground-floor exits. This may be the first place in Ireland in which such a safe and manageable solution has been applied. It is also a facility which can be removed. "It is a modern intervention, but everything we have done with this building can be reversed", says Neil Hegarty, who explains his conservation philosophy as one in which what cannot be achieved within budget is simply secured and left for the next generation. This is a demonstration of what to do when it's impossible to do everything at once: "you have to know where to begin and where to end; in conservation less is more."
Bats in the belfry
The belfry is one example: although there has been a church here since the 12th century, the steeple is comparatively new, erected in 1780. There were not funds enough for full-scale restoration, and if it were removed it might be lost altogether. Instead, it was coated with a protective copper skin which will preserve it until the next tier of conservators arrives. At the same time the clerestory window lighting the belfry has been given a thin aluminium bar at every one of its louvres, so that the bats can continue to thrive here as they have done for centuries, undisturbed by the scavenging pigeons.
The other, plainer windows presented problems too: "We decided to put storm glazing on the outside, while retaining the old timber frames on the inside. We weathered the building in a very simple modern way and in doing that fixed all the newer aluminium frames into the joists between the limestone so that the fabric could not be damaged. Also the old facade on the building was of lime plaster which washed off after about 30 years. We put that plaster back again but added some cement to the mix so that it wouldn't fall off the walls quite so quickly."
The second installation inside of the church is the long model of the city by Roy Tassell of Clonakilty. Here the detail is entrancing, the suburbs emerge at a glance, the inner city and its historic heart lie surrounded by all that has grown around it since before the arrival of St. Finbarre, the river reaches the western marches, divides into its two channels, unites again below the city quays. This is the vision centre, the toy landscape on which planning proposals can be measured, mooted, discussed, decided. Here stand the silos, fifteen stories high at the eastern edge of the city: Neil Hegarty believes that these demonstrate the difference between Cork and, say, Skibbereen, for their presence on the dockside announces the port, and it was from the port that Cork became a city. They should be illuminated; their riverside dominance overshadows what was once the Cork Park and is now an industrialised area, which still has open ground and tree-lined avenues leading on to the Marina. It could become for Cork what La Defense is for Paris. The model here in this ancient church makes the possibility take on the glamour of potential.
St. Peter's Church is not yet open to the public. Work is still going on: work of the kind which in itself is a resource, for it uncovers the methods of earlier times and trains the modern artisans in old processes. The coved ceiling of lathe and plaster and horsehair has been repaired with the same materials so that it can expand and contract as it has always done. The remaining cornicing disguises the s-hook construction of the walls, one of which bulges amiably along its entire length although another, discovered to be on the point of falling out altogether, has been stabilised. All the permanent woodwork is in oak, the rest in beechwood. Cork limestone edges the entrance, which is illuminated from ground-level to preserve the gothic space of the porch. This is floored with a gravestone, for the path is made through a graveyard which is now being restored as a Victorian garden, but where the cobbles give way after a few yards to a medieval foundation.
Resting in peace However the bodies, discovered when the west wall was being stabilised, were not medieval and may be dated as recently as the late 18th century. Re-interred in what was a sacristy, they rest, after an adventurous interim, in the peace also sought by Sir Mathew Deane and his wife, whose entabulatured monument of 1710 awaits its modern resurrection.