St Luke's: Cork's blooming northside neighbourhood sets an example

From dereliction in the '80s and '90s to a trendy neighbourhood that could be a model as Cork’s 15-minute city, Ellie O’Byrne asks: Is St Luke’s getting city planning right?

Hugh Lorigan worries St Luke’s Cross is becoming gentrified at the expense of artists who are being priced out of the community. Picture: Chani Anderson

Hugh and Deirdre Lorigan are at home on a weekday evening, heating up dinner and generally settling in for the night. Deirdre has cycled home to St Luke’s from the west side of the city on her electric bike. Their home is cosy and tasteful, with sanded wood floors and a first-floor living room with views of the city to the south.

It wasn’t always like this.

When the couple bought their house at the top of Summer Hill North in the early 2000s, they gutted the place themselves and worked hard over the course of years to renovate it — living in a building site as they turned it from a neglected and semi-derelict building into the home where they have raised their son, now in his early 20s.

St Luke’s in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s was a different place to what it is today. In the early years of their home ownership, Deirdre describes multiple break-ins to her car — which she used to park on the lane behind their house, known as “Cutthroat Alley”.

The area was in transition then, from a former bedsit land where terraces of three- and four-storey crumbling Victorian houses had been subdivided into cheap flats with attendant social issues — including dereliction, visible signs of addiction issues, vandalism, and a reputation for petty crime — into the trendy city neighbourhood it is today.

Cork City Council, then Cork Corporation, had bemoaned the state of housing in the area in its 1988 Local Area Plan, noting dereliction. Picture: Chani Anderson

In December 2024, two new businesses opened in St Luke’s Cross: a pizzeria called GoodHood, and Mercier Press’s bookshop.

The new arrivals cemented the northside neighbourhood’s already thriving reputation as the city’s ultimate desirable residence district, and complimented the existing range of businesses — including Henchy’s pub, the Wine Tavern, O’Keeffe’s corner shop, a butcher, post office, pharmacy, two Chinese takeaways, and trendy café Cork Coffee Roasters.

St Luke’s Church is home to Live at St Luke’s, a series of gigs by events organisers The Good Room, bringing musical acts both homegrown and from further afield to the social calendar 

There’s even a lifestyle website called stlukes.ie which sells high-end homewares, antiques, and prints.

House prices are high, as formerly subdivided 19th-century houses — built for British army officers and their families — have been snapped up and reconverted into beautiful, high-ceilinged homes of generous proportion.

They contain views over Cork City and an easy stroll not only from all the amenities of the cross itself, but within a 15-minute walk of the city centre.

In fact, housing in the area is in short supply.

On a date in December, just two properties proximate to St Luke’s are advertised on daft.ie: A four-bed on Alexandra Terrace with an asking price of €750,000, and a three-bed on Waterloo Place — in need of substantial renovations — advertised at €395,000.

The estate agents advertising both describe the area as “one of Cork’ s most prestigious and sought-after neighbourhoods”.

‘A tenner a week for a flat’

Long before Hugh and Deirdre bought a house in the area, Hugh — an artist and educator originally from Cavan — had rented there. He first moved to St Luke’s in 1982, drawn to the cheap rents.

“I moved into a house on Mount Vernon Terrace, where I had my first studio,” he recalls.

“There were plenty of empty flats. It was quite bohemian. You could live cheaply. The guy who owned the house lived in Kanturk, and he didn’t give a damn what I did as long as I paid my rent.

“I got a load of art students to move in and converted the downstairs to a studio, built sheds out the back, and had kilns.

“Next door to me was the stained glass artist James Scanlon, and he had his studio there too.”

Cork City Council, then Cork Corporation, had bemoaned the state of housing in the area in its 1988 Local Area Plan, noting high dereliction and vacancy amongst the flats which had been subdivided throughout the 1960s and 1970s along with population decline throughout the early ‘80s as families moved out to the suburbs.

“The St Luke’s area has suffered considerable loss of population over the last two decades,” the plan noted. “Between 1981 and 1986, the decline continued at an even more rapid rate than the previous 10 years, with a 12% drop in the population.”

Cónal admits that the unregulated rental market actually fulfilled an important function by making housing accessible at the time. Picture: Chani Anderson

The basic rule of supply and demand came into effect, and cheap rents attracted a community of cash-strapped early career artists, musicians, and writers.

Author Cónal Creedon set his 1999 novel Passion Play in the bedsits of Wellington Rd.

The novel’s tragic protagonist, Pluto, has neighbours who — described with unerring accuracy — are very much the kinds of characters that Cónal remembers from living in the area in the ‘80s.

“In Passion Play, there was a neighbour who was back from working on building sites in England, there was a German guy who ended up here, there was a woman who may or may not have been a prostitute known as Brenda the Brasser,” Cónal says.

“Pluto himself is a guy with serious mental health problems. Anyone who lived in flatland will recognise these scenarios.”

The quality of housing was far below what current building regulations would permit.

“The toilets wouldn’t work, the stairs would be broken, the water wouldn’t be plumbed right,” Cónal says.

“In some houses, people would have burned all the stair rises and every second tread. But the parties were amazing, just insane. They could go on for days.

“Rent was £10 a week with a two-week deposit. So, for £30 pounds, you had a place. People used to put their rent book on the table with their rent in it and head out for their Friday night and the landlord would let themselves into the flat, take the rent, tick the book, and keep going.

“That was your record of the rent being paid.”

The exclusionary impact of gentrification

While Cónal feels it is important not to glamourise the substandard housing endured by those tenants, he also thinks that the unregulated rental market actually fulfilled an important function — making housing accessible to people on the margins of society for whatever reason.

“People who were leaving home for the first time, people getting out of a bad relationship, people with mental health problems, people just coming out of prison, people who had just arrived in Ireland — anyone could access somewhere cheap to live for a tenner a week,” he says.

“You put up your tenner and you needed two weeks’ rent in advance, so for the grand sum of 30 quid you had a roof over your head.

“Now you need five grand, you’ve to form a queue, and to give your CV to the apartment owners.”

Local artist and resident Hugh Lorigan outside the old post office in St Luke’s, Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson

Cónal fears that the current cost of accommodation is having a “huge stifling effect on society”, not only for young people now denied that all-important experience navigating bills, laundry, and groceries in the school of hard knocks for the first time, but also for many others — including people who may be forced into staying in abusive or unsafe environments through the lack of alternative options.

That’s a time of homelessness that we don’t hear about all that often

“For all of those artists and musicians who are not earning a lot, that housing was really important to them. That’s the big curse of the end of St Luke’s, and that whole style of housing being gone," he says.

The result might be a safer and cleaner neighbourhood, but the flipside is a community that comes to prize affluence to the neglect of the marginalised.

“This apartment is now going to cost something that you can never afford, and that nobody of your type can afford, and it gets to be a classist kind of thing,” he says.

Artists, musicians, and writers

When Mercier Press opened their bookshop at St Luke’s Cross in early December 2024, Cónal — as a local author — was the natural choice to speak at its launch.

The shop, open Thursday to Sunday and stocking a combination of second-hand books and new titles from the Mercier Press and O’Brien Press catalogues, came about almost by chance as the boutique Cork publishers — the oldest independent publisher in Ireland — were initially just seeking a new office space, the head of books, Dee Collins, says.

“But when we saw the space and we saw how vibrant St Luke’s is, we decided to do it,” she says.

“It’s really busy here on the weekends, especially Fridays. Saturday morning, people come down for a coffee and they have a browse. Afternoons, people might be over in Henchy’s for a pint and they’ll pop in.”

Mercier Press was based on Bridge St from the mid-‘60s until the early ‘00s, and so the northside is the small publisher’s spiritual home, Dee says.

Mercier Press bookshop, St Luke's Inn, Carry Out off licence, and the post office at St Luke's Cross, Cork City.  Mercier’s plans for next year include a reprint of sculptor Séamus Murphy’s renowned autobiography, 'Stone Mad', to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. Picture: Larry Cummins

However, it is also fitting that a neighbourhood with such strong literary and artistic connections became home to the independent publisher.

Mercier’s plans for next year include a reprint of sculptor Séamus Murphy’s renowned autobiography, Stone Mad, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death.

Murphy lived in one of the terraces on Wellington Rd and the house continues to be occupied by his son, artist and musician Colm Murphy.

Keen to contribute to a sense of community in its new home, Mercier has put in a large table and seating in their shop and is planning to hold writer’s workshops. It has already held a bookmaking workshop for local children.

It’s a healthy antidote to the massive uptick in living and working in the online world that accompanied covid, Dee says.

“People’s interaction with each other is dwindling, so it’s great to be back in the community. People are coming in and saying they haven’t read a book in years. Kids come in and head straight for the children’s section and smell the books — that’s not something you can replicate online.”

Putting the cross on the map

A bookshop boosting the number of businesses already in the area is a notable addition, creating the sense that St Luke’s is now a destination for northsiders living higher up in less well-served areas like Dillon’s Cross and Ballyvolane — but also for Corkonians further afield.

When Joe Kelly, of The Good Room, first started putting on gigs in St Luke’s Church 10 years ago, he says some denizens of the city couldn’t even have pointed to the cross on a map.

“I would have southsiders saying to me: ‘Where is St Luke’s?’” he says.

“But I’d say, ‘you know Henchy’s?’ and then they’d know it.”

Henchy’s pub, with owner Paddy Reilly at the helm, is certainly one of the landmarks of St Luke’s Cross.

It received a huge additional boost during covid when the council became more flexible about outdoor seating.

A rising tide lifts all boats. For Live at St Luke’s, Henchy’s, and the neighbouring Wine Tavern — and now GoodHood pizzeria — each other’s presence is what makes business in the area good.

Music lovers coming up to the cross for a gig will visit the pub or have a bite to eat before the show, and Joe says he would have been wary of running the church gigs — which are unlicenced — if it wasn’t for the draw of the other businesses in the area.

A model 15-minute city?

Hugh Lorigan identifies the advent of Live at St Luke’s as one of the turning points in the fortunes of the cross.

Hugh and Deirdre now find themselves living in what might be Cork’s closest thing to the much-hyped “15-minute city,” and they say the benefits are enormous.

With everything an easy walk or cycle away, they do maintain one car — but tend not to use it much.

“St Luke’s is an urban village, and it has managed to retain that feel,” Deirdre says, pointing to the proximity of schools, GPs, and financial services in the post office. However, having raised their own child in the area, the couple are keenly aware that it can be a challenging and stressful place to have small children or to be elderly.

They are members of a recently formed community association who were galvanised by the National Transport Authority’s Bus Connects corridor plans for the area. With their input, the plans were changed and the compromise will now involve an electronic “bus gate” at the Glen Ave and another on Summer Hill North — which will make St Luke’s Cross one-way for cars at peak times.

Hugh Lorigan worries St Luke’s Cross is becoming gentrified at the expense of artists who are being priced out of the community. Picture: Chani Anderson

This reduction in the traffic will make the area even more liveable and pleasant for families and the older inhabitants, they feel.

But still, having been a broke artist in the area himself in the 1980s, Hugh still worries about the impacts of gentrification on residents who may have less disposable income to hand.

A proliferation of thriving and fashionable businesses may be fantastic, but Hugh warns that what St Luke’s needs next is an investment in community space where you don’t have to pay to be present

Grassroots green space projects at the Railway Park on lower Grattan Hill and at St Luke’s Community Garden at Ballyhooly Rd — which are starting to provide those free spaces Hugh is talking about — are made up of committed community volunteers.

Hugh fears that, in terms of investment from local government, St Luke’s and its surrounds are still suffering from a slight north-south city divide in terms of resources.

“Down by SuperValu Páirc Uí Caoimh and the Marina, they’re doing a great job and they’re putting in all the best quality materials and stone and really nice fittings,” he points out. “Up in the Glen, which kept us all sane during covid, it’s all scaffolding pipes.

“Next, we need the green areas and the community spaces that don’t cost money to go into: Proper play areas.

“That will protect us from becoming so gentrified that we lose what’s special about St Luke’s.”

• This article was originally published on January 22, 2025.