Trade Names: The Imperial Hotel in Cork is an integral part of the city's life, writes Rose Doyle

Cork city's Imperial Hotel, on the South Mall, has many and passionate fans, been regarded and held in affection through the 193 years of its history. With uniquely sympathetic symmetry, hotel and southern capital have shared the thick and thin of those years, been there for the visiting greats who came, lodged and left behind side-bars to history.

Michael Collins slept in the Imperial Hotel the night before he died. Maria Edgeworth stayed there with Sir Walter Scott - though not, of course, in the same room. Liszt stayed, Charles Dickens came to report on an eminent gathering, William Makepeace Thackeray took tea there with temperance priest Fr Matthew and, years later, George Best came to stay, got into a fight and left. Maureen O'Hara dines there, the actor Brian Dennehy is a regular and so, before Saipan, was Mick McCarthy. He's still welcome, the Imperial Hotel assures.

And then there are the everyday staff and guests, the Corkonians who lunch, take coffee or meet for health spa treats; all of them fans of the intimacy of the Imperial Hotel's grandeur, its way of being salubrious without pretension, its welcoming comforts.

And its history. Dr Seán Pettit, UCC historian, a major Imperial Hotel fan and no mean storyteller, recounts the beginnings and more, deviating to account for his own 30-year devotion to the South Mall inn.

"I love cities and I love city hotels," he says. "City hotels are everyone's parlour and the Imperial is my hang-out. You're bound to meet someone of interest, or that you like, in a city hotel and the Imperial is a real city hotel, not ditsy or all shining armour. It's comfortable, gives the feeling it's been lived in for generations, yet has all the modern comforts you could need."

The Imperial Hotel began life as the front portion of today's hotel in 1813, in a building commissioned as a meeting place for the transaction of business, reading of foreign newspapers and drinking of claret by the Cork Committee of Merchants. It was called The Commercial Rooms.

Seán Pettit, in the way of historians and good storytellers, fills in the background to this and demonstrates how the histories of the city and hotel have paralleled one another. "Cork's Butter Exchange was the most famous butter exchange in the then British Isles," he says. "This had come about in the 1790s after it was discovered that Cork's butter lasted better on sea journeys that could be as long as four/five months."

Cork was at the time sending firkins of salted butter, animal hides and tallow to Bristol and Liverpool, to Hamburg and Rotterdam, to the West Indies and Carolina.

"Cork shot to fame," Seán Pettit explains, "acquired world status. As a consequence, the butter merchants wanted a prestigious building for their meetings, so in 1813 commissioned 20-year-old Thomas Deane to design a building on South Mall you see today. No one could foresee that Deane would go on to great things as when, in 1845, he was commissioned to design UCC, a magnificent building."

But long before that, in 1816, the butter merchants "saw the need for a coaching inn and had one added to the rear. This was in the golden age of coaches and the lovely coach yard is still there. The hotel/inn prospered from the beginning. Sir Walter Scott was one of the first to stay. He brought the lady novelist Maria Edgeworth with him. They came into Cork on the Lady of the Lake stage-coach.

"In the 1840s stage-coaches for Dublin took off from the Imperial coach yard. They left every day, in summer at 5.30am and in winter at 6.30am, and arrived into Dawson Street at roughly 11am next morning. Passengers stayed overnight en route in either Cashel or Clonmel; this was the only way anyone, bishop or thief, could get to Dublin.

"In 1843 the annual meeting of the British Association for Advancement of Science was held for the first time in Ireland, in the Imperial Hotel. Charles Dickens attended and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton; a great week of intellectual intercourse took place and the Imperial Hotel was really on the map.

"As the century stretched out there was a big dinner held for Daniel O'Connell just before he died and, moving into the 1910s, an awful lot of wealthy passengers travelling first class on liners from Queenstown (now Cobh) stayed - some of those for the Titanic may have been among them. And, of course, Michael Collins spent the last night of his life as a guest of the Imperial Hotel before setting off down the South Mall for an inspection tour of the command area of west Cork. The rest is history.

"The stage-coaches had given way to horse-drawn trams and then to electric trams in 1892. A local directory, in 1939, listed electric light as one of the attractions of the hotel. After 1946 the Imperial Hotel took over the former commercial rooms and the whole block became a hotel; up until then the entrance was to the side in Pembroke Street."

And on the Imperial Hotel has gone, through the 20th century (in the 1930s it was the venue for balls which were "well patronised by the resident and neighbouring gentry") and now the 21st.

Maritta Buwalda, who looks after sales and marketing for the hotel, takes up the tale.

"It was owned for some 20 years by a group of Cork businessmen who included Hugh Coveney and Pat Dineen and then, for about five years, by English-based hotel chain, Hanover International. This last didn't work so well and, following the tradition of collaborative ownership, it's been owned since 1998 by John Flynn and the Flynn Hotel Group, a family business which also owns the Park Hotel in Dungarvan, the Old Ground in Ennis and Kyteler's pub in Kilkenny."

Since 1999 the group has put more than €15 million into refurbishing and re-equipping the Imperial Hotel so that today it has 130 bedrooms, a business centre, library, restaurant, brasserie, bar and, balm to soul as well as body, a lifestyle salon and spa.

"We've worked hard to keep the classical Imperial Hotel tradition intact," Maritta says. "This isn't an ultra-modern, minimalist hotel. John Flynn wanted to keep it welcoming in the Irish way. The food served is like that too - lamb, fresh fish, beef, all good, fresh and Irish with a twist."

She's abetted in the telling by Christy Buckley, as convivial and kind a Corkonian as you'll ever meet, the Imperial Hotel's second concierge and a man with his own history in the hotel.

"I'm here 22 years," he says, fast-talking and ever watchful of the needs of guests. "Arrived to do maintenance work and they couldn't get rid of me. There's been big changes; John Flynn's really put money back into the place. My grandmother worked here in the 1930s. Everyone knows the Mall and the Imperial. American visitors always ask about Michael Collins. We'd Jonathan Rhys Myers staying for a few weeks a while ago. A lot of people who had their weddings here come back for their 40th anniversary. We've an 80th birthday coming up for a woman who was married here." He grins. "You get attached to the place, it becomes a part of your life!"

Everyone's a bit like Christy in the Imperial Hotel, part of the family of it you could say. Timmy Herlihy, the head concierge, has clocked up another 22 years with the Imperial Hotel. His father, Donal, worked there for 40 years; "I followed him in the door," Timmy says. "He'd a lot of memories, served Princess Grace and past presidents of Ireland."

And so it goes, with staff in all areas, long tenures and a fondness for the hotel the norm.

A key to the Imperial Hotel's enduring popularity, Maritta says, "is that it's always looked after the business district of Cork. From Monday to Friday you'll find them in the Lafayettes brasserie, doing a bit of business over coffee."

The dignified facade designed by the youthful Thomas Deane in 1813 is today's almost unchanged front and main entrance to the Imperial Hotel. Some things are best left as they were.