6. PRIORITY PROJECTS
6.2 Butter Market and Weighmasters House
Figure 9: 1869 OS Map of Cork City extract showing Butter Market. Footprint of the Weightmaster’s House and Butter Market portico highlighted in red.
Why Butter Market and Weighmasters? The Historic Character Assessment undertaken as part of this Strategy identifies this complex as a significant part of the history of the area’s butter trade with an objective to prioritise its restoration for public use. The Butter Exchange and Weighmaster’s House were the buildings that received the most amount of feedback and interest during the initial consultation phase. The synergies between these two buildings in the historic heart of Shandon are seen as strongly aligning with a core objective under THRIVE: the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings with strong potentialforimpactfulneighborhoodrevitalization. This particular project summary focuses on the aspects needed to develop the Weighmaster’s House as a suitable community space to complement the permitted Enterprise Centre in the Butter Exchange, in order to ensure an overall cohesive project which maximises regenerative impact in line with the principles of New European Bauhaus. Historic Background The Butter Exchange is one of the most prominent buildings in the Historic Heart of Shandon. It was originally built in the late eighteenth century as the Cork butter trade thrived. The market was remodelled with the classical façade and portico were added in 1849 to a design by Sir John Benson. The Weighmasters House to the east was incorporated into the markets at that time, possibly adapting an existing house on the site. At that time the exchange functioned 24-hours a day and almost half a million firkins of butter were traded each year. Trade waned in the second half of the nineteenth century and the exchange
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