Streets of Kilkenny

The People and the businesses of the city of Kilkenny in the 1950 to 1980s are brought back to life in a series of articles originally published in the Old Kilkenny Review.

While most articles in the journal are the product of research in books and manuscripts, for these articles the authors went out on the Kilkenny streets and called on occupants and families. The researchers combined the information they gathered there with their own deep personal knowledge of Kilkenny history.
The authors wrote the articles for their contemporaries, not for us to read fifty or sixty years later. They remind their readers what used to be on the spot before the Monster House, or before Café Maria, or before the Cloth Hall – businesses which themselves have long since disappeared. What they recorded then, has become our history.
For us, the articles serve a dual purpose. They are written record of how the streets must have appeared in the 1960s and can be used as a Street Directory. They also record the living memory of that period, the street lore, the stories that everyone knew. If our authors had not put pen to paper, those memories would never have survived. As far as we know, none of the authors are still living.

(The referential shop names given are representing the situation in March 2018.)

Please click on the pages in the OKR to open the searchable pdf file. Due to the dark nature of the scans and to prevent unnessessary print-ounts in general, it is not recommended to print out the pages.