Colm O'Regan: I wouldn't be surprised to see Gene Hackman in the Marina Market
Apart from the bird pooing on my arm, it was a lovely visit.
Apart from the bird pooing on my arm, it was a lovely visit. Thankfully it missed the pizza. No one wants that kind of topping.Â
We were down at the Marina Market in Cork. Have you been? It’s an extraordinary thing in an Irish context, It’s Fierce Berliny Altogether. Or Copenhageny. Just Generally Continental. It’s a bustling market in a warehouse on Centre Park Road. The food isn’t a rip-off. There are plenty of seats. And not all the seats are beneath bird roosts.
We were down there one roasting hot Sunday afternoon. This hive of activity at the end of the quiet docks of a Sunday. You would think it might be hipstery. But if there are hipsters there, they seem to be there with their mams. There is no fake industrial-ish stuff. It’s down the docks. Industry is all around. If you continue on walking you go can go all the way to Blackrock if you want. A lovely promenade under trees and next to water.
But I prefer to wander around the warehouses and silos of old industry. The kind of landscape that looks like a 1970s cop show. I expect to see a crumpled Columbo or Jim Rockford being thrown out of a Chevy Impala. Or Gene Hackman just chasing a fella for AGES. Dusty wide quays. Enormous walls.
I’ve a fierce soft spot for old industrial places. There are no glass atriums or reimaginings, nothing is ‘evoking’ a sailing boat. The design is just pure function. The wall looks like this for a reason. Here is the roof. Big Stuff goes in this Enormous Door. There are no other layers.
That’s why I liked the Marina Market. It’s a big feck-off warehouse with things in it. the high roof on a hot day means that it’s a pleasant temperature inside. No artifice no pretence. And while you were sitting and looking, you are left in no doubt as to what the heritage of the area is. Industry.
It’s not Brunel and a giant anchor. It’s 20th-century industry. There are enormous corrugated asbestos walls on some of the nearby warehouses. It’s not solar panels, wind farms, and corporate videos where the fella who does all the voiceovers says the word strategic a lot.
So many of us live our lives far from the source and the consequence of our stuff. We shop in malls covered in plastic and fibreglass, and LED lighting and branding (the malls, not us unless it’s for Comic Con). Every part of the process of whatever yoke we bought has been abstracted away from us.
Down on Kennedy Quay, you see where the silos where the animal feed that fed the animals that made the food we ate was stored. It’s not hidden. And please excuse me for making a giant leap based on nothing but...it’s really important that we are more aware of what needs to be done to run an economy. In transport energy, food, stuff. I’m not suggesting we bring the tanneries and ironworks and slaughterhouses back to the city centres or that the pigs should be marched through the streets and their screams for your breakfast roll should pierce your soul. But being down the docks was just a reminder: things don’t arrive in the shops by accident.
I know there are big plans for the south docks. And no doubt it’ll be tall and glass and architecty and evokey, and there’ll be squillions of yards of office space for companies with amazing logos and mission statements.
Good luck to them. But let’s hear it for the unlovely places of industry. The industrial estates, the warehouses, the N-shaped rooves, the silos. The beep-beep of lots of reversing and forklifts. The screeching of seagulls. Even the one above me and my pizza.
