Thompsons Bakery

Thompsons Bakery was established in 1826, as the stained glass in the fanlight above your heads describes. The business was established by Christina Malenoir Thompson and the original premises was at Clarke’s Bridge. By the 1840s the family had businesses on 2 & 3 Bridge Street and 8 & 9 Prince’s Street; their Bridge Street shops are now occupied by Cork Coffee Roasters and Vibes and Scribes.

This bread factory was built in 1889, designed by architects Robert Walker and Son. It’s comprised of two great blocks with their gables facing the street, linked by a lower section that was once a gateway. The left-hand block housed the offices, and you can see the generous windows allowing light into the office spaces. The right-hand block housed the flour store, which has smaller windows and looks far more like a fortress.

Thompsons Bakery was huge industrial enterprise that delivered bread and cakes not just across Cork City, but across much of Munster. While the bread was a staple of many Cork households for over a century, Thompsons were particularly famed for their cakes.

Thompsons also had an extensive export business, selling tinned whiskey cake, along with Medera and Dundee cakes, to markets as far flung as Canada and the USA, along with Britain, Austria, France and Holland.

The 1970s appears to have been a heyday for the company. With their new sponge factory on McCurtain Street (the modern building next door), and the adoption of mechanised processes in their bread making, they were expanding. Three new retail outlets opened in the 1970s, and they also overhauled their famous shop and café on Prince’s Street.

The bakery began to struggle financially in the early 1980s and a liquidator was appointed to the firm in late 1984. Production continued, but when an ad appeared in the paper seeking applications for staff for a ‘new’ bakery in Cork trading as Thompsons Bakeries, staff staged a sit in in January 1985, demeaning that they would have first refusal of these new jobs. There were fears for the city’s bread supply, as Thompsons accounted for one quarter of the bread in Cork at the time.

The company ceased trading in 1985 and the site was sold to the Lynch family. Recently they have lovingly restored the building which now houses Thompon’s microbrewery and restaurant, Starcircle and Mariott International.