Overview
There is nothing to go inside for yet. The Counting House is closed to the public while Cork City Council turns it into the city’s new library, so for now this is a building you look up at rather than enter. It is worth the look. The half-timbered, mock-Tudor front on South Main Street is the last of the Beamish & Crawford brewery left standing; everything around it came down in the 1960s.
A brewing legacy
Two Cork merchants, Richard Beamish and Richard Crawford, established the Beamish & Crawford brewery in 1792. It grew fast, for a time one of the largest breweries in Ireland, and kept working through two centuries and several takeovers until Heineken closed the brewing here in 2009. The stout is still made in Cork and poured across the city. When redevelopment works opened the old fabric up in 2020, a trove of brewery documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned up inside.
The architecture
The surviving building is the Counting House, where the brewery’s money was counted, designed by the Cork firm Chillingworth & Levie and completed in 1919. It is deliberate mock-Tudor: a half-timbered frontage flanked by Flemish-style staggered gables, with wooden panelling, a timber staircase and a grand fireplace within. When the brewery was rebuilt in the 1960s, this is the piece that was spared, and it now sits on Cork City Council’s Record of Protected Structures (ref PS330). The same firm designed the Oval Bar on the corner, so the two make a matched pair worth a glance.
The library to come
In May 2026, Cork City Council paid €35 million for the Counting House complex to replace the cramped Grand Parade library, which had served the city since 1930. At just over 83,600 square feet, the new building is more than three times the size. The plans run to 300 study spaces, a new entrance and concourse, expanded sections for children, teenagers and young adults, an extended music library, a café and shop, and flexible space for lectures, performances and exhibitions, with the plaza built to take outdoor concerts. As of mid-2026 the council is still procuring the design teams, and a Part 8 planning process will settle the detail, so opening is some way off.
Around the building
The Counting House sits on the medieval spine of Cork, a couple of minutes from the English Market and the Triskel Christchurch, with a new passageway now linking South Main Street through to Crosses’s Green. The wider Brewery Quarter is being rebuilt around it, which means intermittent roadworks and shifted bus routes in the meantime. The one time in recent years the doors opened to the public was the STAMP festival in May 2023, when the building held more than fifty art, design and craft events.
Practical information
- Address: South Main Street, Cork
- Inside: closed to the public during construction; the exterior and plaza are free to see at any time
- Getting there: a short walk from the city-centre bus stops on Grand Parade and Washington Street, and roughly twenty minutes on foot from Cork Kent Station
- Parking: on-street spaces are limited; use the paid city-centre car parks
For now the best of it is free and takes five minutes: stand on South Main Street, look up at the timber and the gables, then cut through to the English Market. Watch Cork City Council’s channels for the opening date, whenever it comes.