Herbert Simms E-Book

Lindie Naughton

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Dublin's teeming slums, long regarded as the worst in Europe, were teetering on the brink of structural and sanitary public catastrophe during the early twentieth century. To tackle the crisis, Herbert Simms was appointed the city's first housing architect. During a sixteen-year period, from 1932 until 1948, Simms and his team planned, commissioned and built an astounding 17,000 homes –some as inner-city flat complexes, others as family houses in newly-created suburbs such as Crumlin and Cabra. Like the city's acclaimed Georgian squares, the Simms-designed Corporation flats in particular have stood the test of time, injecting a touch of art deco and modernist glamour to neglected neighbourhoods. This comprehensive guide to the Simms buildings also highlights the many struggles with politicians and bureaucrats Simms and his staff experienced as they did their best to build well-designed, affordable housing for the people of Dublin.

Leseprobe

HERBERT SIMMS

First published in 2023 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Lindie Naughton, 2023

The right of Lindie Naughton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-910-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-912-5

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Edited by Djinn von Noorden

Cover design by Niall McCormack, hitone.ie

Cover images clockwise from top left: Chancery House (courtesy of the G. & T. Crampton Archive); Henrietta House (courtesy of Gary Teeling); Herbert Simms (courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive); Chancery House (courtesy of the G. & T. Crampton Archive); Women's Bathing Shelter at Dollymount (William Murphy, Creative Commons License); Chancery House (courtesy of the G. & T. Crampton Archive)

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‘In natural beauty of situation in the dignity of its wide streets and Georgian architecture, few capitals can vie with Dublin. Only during the past 50 years has the octopus of thoughtless development and ill-designed buildings seriously threatened our city.’

– Manning Robertson, A Cautionary Guide to Dublin (1934)

Contents

 Preface

1The Move into the Cities

2Corporation Housing: the first buildings 1877–1913

3A Grand Plan for Dublin: 1914–30

4The ‘Million Pound Scheme’

5Herbert Simms: a man with a mission

6The Housing Crisis Reaches a Peak

7The 1939 Inquiry

8The ‘Emergency’ and War Work

9The Final Projects 1945–8

10What Followed Simms

 Appendices

A.Flat Complexes 1932–50

B.Urban and Suburban‘Cottage’ Schemes 1929–50

C.Estates

 Bibliography and Sources

 Acknowledgements

Preface

While the cathedrals, museums, colleges, parks and imposing palaces of government are never to be ignored, the more modest buildings where people live, shop and work make up the true fabric of a living and thriving city.

Dublin certainly has its grand buildings, among them the Custom House, the Four Courts, City Hall, the old Houses of Parliament on College Green, Trinity College, Christ Church and St Patrick’s cathedrals, and the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham. It also has magnificent gardens, most notably the Phoenix Park, but also St Stephen’s Green, the Iveagh Gardens and the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Yet in the eighteenth century, when the city as we know it was taking shape, it was the red-brick Georgian squares and streets, with their accompanying gardens and streets of shops that gave the city its unique character.

From the early twentieth century onwards, new buildings continued to add style – and bring life – to city streets later colonised by anonymous offices and chain stores. These handsome constructions, although clearly modern, show respect for the city’s heritage and sympathy for the streetscape: they enhance rather than impose, unlike so many later edifices of lesser quality. Pause and look and you will notice the detail: a curve to the corner of the building, an arch, small balconies, even – in the case of one complex – a playful aviation motif.

Dubliners will have passed these buildings countless times; you’ll find some of the best at Chancery Lane, Townsend Street, Henrietta Place and Marrowbone Lane. They’ve become as much a part of the city as the grander buildings. Yet these were practical buildings constructed not with commercial intent, but for housing Dublin’s less prosperous citizens.

Public housing, or social housing, as it’s become known, is not always renowned for the excellence of its design. Good architecture costs money. But in 1932 Dublin struck gold when Herbert Simms became the city’s first housing architect at a time when Dublin Corporation was embarking on a much-needed campaign to clear the city’s notorious slums. Simms’ brief was to provide housing for the homeless in the form of apartment blocks, as well as ‘cottage’ estates on the expanding fringes of the city.

Simms did his best work from 1932 to 1938, six years spent in a flurry of activity. He was chronically short of money, materials and manpower; he was put under pressure by politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders; he was forced to take shortcuts. Yet his best buildings were sturdily built, with an elegance that makes them instantly recognisable. They’ve survived far better than later social housing projects since demolished. Although occasionally threatened by thoughtless local councillors, many are now protected structures undergoing sympathetic refurbishment.

Simms and his team’s meticulous work are proof positive that well-built social housing can add immensely to the tone and style of a city. Following his example were city architects in the 1950s who also deserve recognition. With thousands again homeless in Dublin, and a dawning realisation that a living city needs homes, shops and other small businesses at its heart if it is to survive, his work remains a touchstone and an inspiration.

1

The Move into the Cities

From the early eighteenth century Dublin and other urban settlements all over the world were developing into cities, continuing a process sparked by the break-up of the feudal system many centuries earlier.

With living off the land no longer possible for most, and the industrial revolution seeing what we know as ‘work’ moving from handicrafts in the home to paid labour in the factory, thousands migrated from rural areas in search of paid work in the makeshift workshops and purpose-built factories of the cities. Housing these incomers, most of them impoverished, became a serious issue.

In 1798 James Whitelaw, vicar of St Catherine’s in the Liberties area of Dublin, had made a census of his ‘distressed’ parish, visiting every house, cabin and hovel. His graphic descriptions of city life were included in a two-volume history of the city of Dublin, published in 1818.

Inhabitants of the Liberties, ‘by far the greater part of whom are in the lowest stage of human wretchedness’, occupied narrow lanes:

where the insalubrity of the air usual in such places is increased to a pernicious degree by the effluvia of putrid offals, constantly accumulating front and rear. The houses are very high and the numerous apartments swarm with inhabitants. It is not infrequent for one family or an individual to rent a room and set a portion of it by the week, or night, to any accidental occupant, each person paying for that portion of the floor which his extended body occupies.

A single apartment ‘in one of those truly wretched habitations’ cost between one and two shillings a week. Two, three or even four families could share a single room: ‘hence at an early hour we may find from ten to sixteen persons of all ages and sexes in a room not 15 feet square, stretched on a wad of filthy straw, swarming with vermin, and without any covering, save the wretched rags that constitute their wearing apparel’.

Thirty to fifty people might be found living in a single dwelling: one house, No. 6 Braithwaite Street, contained 108 individuals. In the Plunkett Street of 1798, 32 houses contained 917 inhabitants – that’s an average of almost thirty souls per house.

Whitelaw queried why ‘slaughter-houses, soap-manufacturers, carrion-houses, distilleries, glass-houses, lime-kilns and dairies’ existed in the midst of these teeming slums. He highlighted the 190 licensed ‘dram-houses’ in the Thomas Street area where raw spirits were sold at all hours. Drunkenness was universal, even on the Sabbath, while the area supplied the more opulent parts of the city with its ‘nocturnal street walkers’.

A primitive approach to sanitation was a major cause of disease:

This crowded population … is almost universally accompanied by a very serious evil – a degree of filth and stench inconceivable, except by such as have visited those scenes of wretchedness … into the back yard of each apartment, frequently not ten feet deep, is flung from the windows of each apartment, the ordure and filth of its inhabitants; from which it is so seldom removed, that it may be seen nearly on a level with the windows of the first floor; and the moisture that after heavy rains, ouzes [sic] from this heap, having no sewer to carry it off, runs into the street.

The landlord was usually ‘some money-grasping wretch, who lived in affluence in, perhaps, a distant part of the city’. In one case the entire side of a four-storey house had collapsed. To the astonishment of Whitelaw, about thirty inhabitants continued to live in the ruined building and paid the landlord rent for the privilege.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Dublin’s population stood at a figure of 172,000 and it was considered the second city of the British empire. Its inner-city slums were the result not only of industrialisation and political changes but of an over-supply of expensive housing by speculative builders, followed by the arrival of rural labourers looking for work and needing accommodation. At the time Whitelaw and his co-authors were writing their history of the city, the Georgian streets and squares, both north and south of the Liffey, were still ‘spacious, airy and elegant’, although the number of civil servants looking for such accommodation had declined and the middle and professional classes were fleeing the filth and degradation of the city for the newly-created townships of Pembroke and Rathmines. Pembroke was mostly owned by the Earl of Pembroke, while Rathmines was controlled by middle-class businessmen such as Frederick Stokes, an English property developer.

Little changed over the next few decades despite major political upheavals. In 1801, largely in response to the 1798 rebellion by the United Irishmen, Ireland was integrated into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union, with Irish MPs voting their parliament into extinction and Catholics promised the prize of emancipation under the union. The promise was not kept. Robert Emmet’s 1803 revolution was the final flicker of radical, urban-based rebellion: future rebellions would be led by a rural population protesting against iniquitous taxes and rents. Dublin’s decline from second city of the empire to provincial backwater had begun. For the next 122 years its 400-odd parliamentarians, many of them owners of large estates in rural Ireland, would conduct their business not in Dublin but at Westminster.

In the years following the Act of Union, the elegant mansions in Henrietta Street, Gardiner Street, Dominick Street, Summerhill and Mountjoy Square on the north side of the Liffey, many of them relatively new, were abandoned. Sites bought for building purposes were left derelict. Property prices crashed: a house valued at £2,000 before the union was worth about £55 in the 1820s. When not taken over by the better-off lawyers and bankers, the larger mansions fell into the hands of speculative investors, who sold yearly leases in the properties to smaller investors; these then let out rooms for a weekly rent. According to one visitor to the city in 1822, it was not possible to walk in any direction for half an hour in the city without coming upon ‘the loathsome habitations of the poor’.

Previously, the rich had lived in the main streets. Their employees, as well as the city’s small shop-keepers, publicans and businessmen, lived in the lesser streets behind or, in the case of Dublin, in ‘the Liberties’. As the name indicated, the Liberties was an area outside the city walls dating back to medieval times, which was not under the jurisdiction of the city. It later attracted wealthy merchants from the thriving weaving industries, as many of the street names indicate.

Following the departure of the wealthier and their middle-class entourages from the city centre, warrens of poorly-constructed buildings appeared down narrow alleys, lanes and stables originally designed to service the larger houses. From the 1840s onwards, housing of this nature was often demolished to make room for small factories and for the newly emerging railway lines and stations.

With no native source of cheap energy and no parliament in Dublin, Ireland’s few industries were left unprotected and forced to pay high duties on essentials such as coal. While its breweries and distilleries continued to employ large numbers of workers – as indeed did the manufacturers of biscuits and mineral waters – the silk industry was wiped out because of the unrestricted importing of raw and dyed silk into Great Britain and Ireland. Not even a reduction in wages could save it, although in 1824, when the first steamer service between Dublin and Liverpool was established, the silk industry was still employing an estimated 6,000 people in Dublin, about half what it had been at its peak. That would drop to no more than thirty to forty by 1832.

With its native industries in crisis, Ireland became primarily a supplier of cattle and agricultural goods to Britain. Dublin and its environs became a place of passage not only for livestock but increasingly for people; the great harbour of Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire, built in the 1820s, symbolised the start of a new era in Irish trade.

Britain, the first truly industrialised nation in the world, had created an empire reaching all corners of the globe and was, by any measure, the most powerful nation in the world at the time. Lured by stories of well-paid work in the factories of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham and Glasgow, the rural poor arrived in Dublin seeking to find their way across the narrow Irish Sea to what seemed to them to be the Promised Land. Many got no further; others, who managed to scrape together the money for a ferry ticket, failed to find work and returned to Dublin soon after.

Before 1840 only 353 houses in Dublin were described as ‘tenements’; that is, a city house originally built for one family taken over by a landlord or ‘house jobber’. He then farmed them out as one-, two- and three-roomed ‘apartments’ for the highest rent possible without in any way improving the sanitation or adapting them for occupation by multiple families. Although scattered all over the city, most of the worst tenements were concentrated in the Gardiner Street and Dominick Street areas near the docks, while in the Liberties, the alleys and lanes off Francis Street, the Coombe and Cork Street were as crowded and filthy as ever. Of the 25,822 families living in tenements, a total of 20,108 lived in one room. As Whitelaw had found in 1798, one house could contain as many as ninety-eight people.

While not quite as bad as in Whitelaw’s time, sanitation remained rudimentary – usually consisting of an ash-pit and a ‘privy midden’, which consisted of an outhouse connected to a dump for waste in the back yard of a building. Originally, it had simply been a hole in the ground. For most, a bucket secreted in a cupboard was the family toilet. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did ‘water closets’, using water to flush away human waste through a drainpipe for disposal elsewhere, become prevalent. In Dublin that ‘elsewhere’ was usually the River Liffey, where a spring tide could cause the sewer flaps to close. As a result, the drains backed up, causing sewer gas to seep into the cellars with disastrous effects.

Mortality rates were shocking. A report in 1845 found that over half of all children died before they reached the age of five and only one-third of the working classes lived beyond the age of twenty. Politics at the time offered no solutions. Beyond the provision of workhouses after 1830, social welfare in the modern sense did not exist. Almost all housing was privately rented and laissez-faire politicians argued against any measures that might hamper a wealthy individual’s right to compete freely in the marketplace. Little notice was paid to the workers living in the tenements who helped create that wealth. With ‘municipal socialism’ and state intervention frowned upon, voluntary organisations attempted to provide basic housing and other amenities. Only when it became obvious that the vermin-infested slums were a breeding ground for infectious diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis, and for the cholera that could infect the wealthy as well as the poor, was public funding used to lay water mains and sewer lines. Workhouses for the destitute and debilitated were also funded.

With wheat and other cereals difficult to grow in Ireland’s damp conditions, most families in rural and urban Ireland survived on a diet based on potatoes. In 1845 the potato harvest failed. In the resulting five-year ‘Great Famine’, one million Irish men, women and children died and at least a further million emigrated. Infectious diseases, rather than starvation, were responsible for most deaths. With the famine creating widespread homelessness, extra workhouses were built to cater for 250,000 people. The famine was followed by a free-trade era, which left Irish farmers unable to compete in the British market with cheaper produce from America, Australia and the Russian wheat belt.

Because living off the land was proving increasingly impossible, migration into the larger cities continued, swelling the ranks of unskilled labour. By 1849 the number of tenements in Dublin had risen to 5,995; by 1890 it would reach 9,760. A cholera outbreak in 1848 spurred the provision of single men’s lodging houses, while some employers were building what amounted to social housing for their workers. Among them was Thomas Vance, a merchant, who built a low-rent ‘model lodging house’ along with baths for thirty families at Chapel Lane off Lower Bridge Street in the Liberties.

Some recognition of the farmer’s vital role in feeding the nation would come later when local authorities built thousands of subsidised cottages – the first state-funded social housing in Ireland or indeed in any part of the British Isles. The urgent need for providing public housing in a similar fashion in the cities was largely ignored. For most property-owners, it was easier to stigmatise slum-dwellers as drunkards, thieves and prostitutes than to recognise a larger social issue which urgently needed redressing.

From 1850 Dublin Corporation, which had replaced the landlord-class, dominated City Assembly in 1840, took responsibility for drainage, paving, cleansing and lighting in the city. After 1849 nationalists would come to dominate all the city’s fifteen wards, promoting their own interests as the owners of small shops, pubs and tenements. When conservative unionists became increasingly exasperated at the jobbery and corruption of the Corporation, they began moving out of the city to new suburban townships, where they could have some control over their immediate environment.

A critical problem for all property-owners were the local ‘rates’, a tax based on the ‘rateable valuation’ of the property – the rent that a tenant was prepared to pay to a landlord. This was paid to the local council for providing services such as mains water, road maintenance and refuse collection, or ‘scavenging’ as it was then called. For example, in 1873 a house in Gardiner Street was available for rent at £60 a year plus an additional £17 16s 3d in local rates. A downward general revaluation of property in 1852 had resulted in a loss of vital revenue which, until 1890, came to the Corporation through a Collector General. Many landlords were reluctant to improve their properties since that would increase their rateable value, while Dublin Corporation conspired to keep rates low for property-owners by economising on public services. It was a flawed system unrelated to the ability to pay.

In 1851 Lord Shaftesbury, ‘the poor man’s earl’, had introduced laws giving local authorities in Britain the power to build and maintain public lodging houses. By now the ‘housing question’ had become a matter of public concern, thanks to the novels of Charles Dickens and pioneering work by social campaigners, among them Octavia Hill. Over fifty years, she restored and managed 15,000 properties in London. Hill believed that charitable work must begin by looking after the family and providing homes for everyone. A weekly visit to collect the rent allowed for broader contact with the tenants and an offer of help if problems arose. Hill turned the rough open spaces around the alleys and terraces into playgrounds, and fought against the overdevelopment of precious open ground in city centres.

Good sanitation was the key to healthy living in any crowded city. Under the Sanitary Act of 1866, local authorities could compel landlords to connect their sewerage system to the main drainage system and Dublin Corporation recruited a number of sanitary inspectors from the police force. Shortly before this John Gray, the chairman of Dublin Corporation’s water works committee, came up with a plan to provide Dublin with a water and sanitation system fit for a growing city. Until then Dublin’s water had come from the canals, which were in private hands. Gray proposed building a large, publicly owned reservoir at Vartry in Roundwood, connected to Dublin by a 4 km-long underground tunnel; a considerable engineering feat for the time. The scheme proved an outstanding success, winning Gray a knighthood after it was opened in 1863. Yet despite occasional successes, with only 8,000 or so of the city’s wealthier citizens having a vote, the interests of property-owners were rarely threatened and few, if any, were forced to improve the condition of their tenements.

Under the Labouring Classes (Lodging Houses and Dwellings) Act, also passed in 1866, private companies or municipal authorities could apply to the Irish Board of Works for loans to cover up to half the cost of a housing scheme at just 4 per cent interest payable over forty years. An immediate result was the emergence of joint-stock companies set up to provide urban housing with shareholders entitled to a dividend of no more than 5 per cent. One of the first was the short-lived Dublin Industrial Tenements Company, founded in 1866 by a group of prominent Dublin businessmen and public-health campaigners. Among them was Dr Edward Dillon Mapother, who had been appointed Dublin’s first medical officer in 1864. Its New Model Dwellings, a four-storey brick tenement block with fifty small flats on a cleared site at Meath Street, was designed to house 2,200 of Dublin’s poorest. It swiftly degenerated into a slum every bit as dangerous and unsanitary as the tenements it had replaced.

With only £190,000 advanced by the Board of Works over twenty years, the Act had minimal impact. Equally ineffectual was the Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Act of 1868 (the ‘Torrens Act’), which gave local authorities the power to take over and, if necessary, demolish unsanitary dwellings when landlords refused to repair them.

In 1872 the Local Government Board for Ireland was created, taking over the functions of the Poor Law Commissioners and supervising municipal government and spending from its head office in the Custom House. Making up the board were the chief secretary and the under-secretary, along with three permanent members, including a qualified doctor as medical commissioner. While the Board readily agreed to loans for public lighting, electricity supply, drainage, street paving and the Fire Brigade service, it baulked at financing costly slum-clearance projects.

Clearly government needed a push and when 1,650 people died in a smallpox epidemic that lasted from late 1871 to early 1872, public alarm led to the establishment of the Dublin Sanitary Association, which included doctors, lawyers and businessmen. It lobbied successfully for the extension of the Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875 (the ‘Cross Act’) to Ireland, which meant that, for the first time, government loans for clearing the unsanitary areas of their towns and cities were offered to local authorities. The act boosted urban reform, with Waterford the first local authority in Ireland to build public housing.

Although financing any slum-clearance scheme remained a problem for Dublin Corporation, after 1875 the Board of Works paid for purchasing and demolishing areas, laying new streets and improving sewers, lighting and water supply. Three areas initially earmarked for clearing were the Coombe and Plunkett Street areas in the Liberties, along with Boyne Street, off Westland Row, in the city centre.

In June 1876 Dr Mapother had recommended the demolition and clearance of 110 dwellings in a four-acre site of the Coombe previously occupied by textile manufacturers and tradesmen. When clearing it proved costlier than expected, the Corporation was authorised to borrow £24,000 to cover the cost of compensating landowners, the expense of demolition and the installation of sewers, lighting and paving on what were new ‘streets’. Since the Corporation was not yet prepared to take on the burden of constructing housing itself, the cleared sites were handed over to the Dublin Artisans’ Dwellings Company (DADC), a joint-stock company founded in 1876 and chaired by Sir Arthur Guinness.

In 1880 the foundation stones were laid for 210 dwellings: ninety-two one-storey, 114 two-storey and four three-storey houses in four different designs. Class A and B were of Portland cement concrete; Class C was fronted with red brick, while Class D had front and end walls of red brick and side walls in concrete. Each house had its own scullery, coalhouse, privy and private concrete yard. By 1893 all but eight of the houses were occupied; those without tenants were used as shops and for housing caretakers. Rents ranged from 3s 6d to 7s; not unreasonable at a time when labourers, porters and carters could earn between 15s to 18s a week, painters from 24s to 29s and craftsmen up to 36s. Unfortunately, the annual rent of £200 per acre that the DADC paid the Corporation came nowhere near covering the cost of acquiring the site and servicing the £24,000 government loan.

Next for clearance was a site in Plunkett Street, off Francis Street in the Liberties, with the acquisition handled by Dudgeon Brothers, a commercial engineering and surveying firm. Fifty-two owners had lodged compensation claims totalling £39,891 3s 11d. Of these, twenty-seven sold out for £9,565 while the rest were in arbitration. Dudgeon Brothers had argued that acquiring property by private treaty was generally less expensive than arbitration, but by 1887 the total cost of clearing the area had more than doubled to £31,000 and the question of excessive compensation became the subject of a Royal Commission. After it recommended no further private deals, an arbitrator was appointed by the Board of Works. When Plunkett Street was finally cleared, it was leased to the DADC for £133 per acre – cheaper than in the Coombe. A scheme of red-brick cottages with internal water closets and sculleries was built, providing homes for 320 families.

Around the same time a special committee began preparing a scheme for improving and disposing of the Oxmantown Estate in Stoneybatter. Originally an open area, or rough commonage, stretching from Church Street to the Phoenix Park, the estate had been leased by the Corporation to the Earl of Ormond for a period of 200 years in 1682. After that lease expired, sixty-four tenement houses in the streets around Barrack Street and Tighe Street to the south of the estate were cleared. They had housed 1,048 people.

In that area and others, the DADC was purchasing its own sites, starting in 1877 with a scheme of 1,200 houses. By 1914 it had a portfolio of over 3,300 dwellings, making it twice as productive as Dublin Corporation at a time when few private developers were building houses. Among its early projects were small flats in central schemes like Upper Birmingham Street, where thirty-two houses and flats were constructed, and a four-storey flat block at Echlin Street, which was criticised at the time as ‘barrack-like’ by the Irish Builder; yet thisblockhas aged well and is still in use. Another flat block was built at Dominick Street, while the DADC was also buying plots in Rathmines, Bray and Dún Laoghaire. The schemes, aimed at the better-off workers, freed up cheaper tenement accommodation for the poorest of working-class families.

More purely philanthropic than the DADC in aim was the Iveagh Trust, set up in April 1890. In collaboration with the DADC, the trust began its work at a site close to the Guinness brewery on the corner of Thomas Court and Bellevue. There it built two large three-storey red-brick blocks, providing 118 single-room flats. These soon became overcrowded.