Civic Trust House opens doors for Culture Night 2025

For Cork City Culture Night 2025, Friday September 19th, Civic Trust House will open its doors to reveal voices from its past as part of a Heritage Council funded project.

Working with Victoria Kingston, Director of the West Cork History Festival, they will delve into the 300-year history of the riverside Georgian Building which is home today to a number of arts organisations. It was once a fine merchant’s home, then a hospital, then a boarding house “in a state of dirt and dilapidation” in the late 19th century and through most of the 20th century. By the 1980s it was derelict before being saved in the 1990s by the newly formed Cork Civic Trust.

Working with Strive Theatre Company, they will create fourteen short, first-person, monologues inspired by real people who lived or worked there, or in the locality, each rooted in documented history and brought to life by professional actors.

Culture Night will probably be the public’s only chance to see these monologues performed live, in an open rehearsal. Afterward, the pieces will be recorded and released later this year as an interactive online resource — with each “voice” linked to a window of the house, inviting visitors to step into its stories from wherever they are.

Among the characters emerging are Abbé Louis Bertrand, a French priest who boarded there in the late 19th century who produced his own medicines — for gout, and possibly other ailments — and left behind an extensive trove of papers and Frances Ryan, daughter of an RIC constable, and later school inspector, who fell in love with a schoolteacher lodging there. The striking photograph which was discovered very recently shows her astride a motorcycle at the front door.