Do You Remember These? Cork's Beloved Roches Stores and Virgin Megastore
Do you remember Roches Stores or the Virgin Megastore in Cork? Share your memories of these lost city landmarks in today’s age of online shopping.
For many Corkonians, a trip into town in the 1990s and early 2000s meant two essential stops: Roches Stores and the Virgin Megastore. Both are long gone now, but anyone who shopped there will remember them as proper Cork landmarks.
Roches Stores on St. Patrick's Street was much more than a department store. Families made it their Saturday afternoon destination for clothes, homeware, or just a good browse. The café was always busy, and those Christmas window displays were something special - you'd see crowds gathered outside admiring them every December. When Debenhams took over in 2006 and eventually shut down in 2020, it felt like losing a piece of Cork itself for those who'd grown up with Roches.
Just around the corner, Virgin Megastore was where music lovers spent their time and money. Tucked into the Queen's Old Castle shopping centre, it had rows and rows of CDs, DVDs, band posters, and merchandise. Teenagers would spend ages in there, hunting for new music or queuing up for those midnight album releases that seemed so important at the time. When it closed in the mid-2000s, something was lost that Spotify just can't replace - there was real excitement in flipping through physical albums and chatting with other music fans about what was worth buying.
These weren't just shops, they were meeting places that gave Patrick's Street its character. Now that everything's gone online or taken over by the same chains you'll find anywhere, it's hard not to miss what made Cork's city centre feel uniquely ours.
Do you have memories of either place? Maybe grabbing a coffee upstairs in Roches, or finding that album you'd been looking for in Virgin?
