Flats And Cottages is a fully illustrated exploration of the incredible career and legacy of Herbert Simms, Dublin’s first dedicated housing architect.
In 1932, Herbert Simms was appointed the capital’s first dedicated housing architect. Over the next sixteen years, he spearheaded one of the most ambitious public housing programmes in the history of the state, delivering 17,000 flats and cottages in the inner-city and emerging suburbs. Clearing some of Dublin’s worst tenements, Simms and his team gave modern homes to generations of working-class Dubliners, transforming not only their lives but the fabric of the city.
Sinn Fein TD Eoin Ó Broin and Belfast based photographer Mal McCann utilise prose, photography, and interviews to tell the story of Herbert Simms’ work during these tumultuous years and give voice to the history and experiences of today’s residents of his buildings. Flats and Cottages also examines the lessons that can be applied to our own contemporary housing crisis to ensure that working people have access to decent and affordable homes. Stephen Stone enters the most famous house in the land to speak to the author.
I don’t know what you have to do to get easily into Leinster House. Get elected, one supposes. However, I’m just a visitor, here to meet a Sinn Fein TD and so I have to go through all the rigorous checks that face Chinese people trying to smuggle contraband and forbidden fruit, (including actual fruit) into Sydney Airport. It possibly doesn’t help that I currently look like the infamous 19th Century Fenian leader Jerimiah O’Donavan Rossa. (The beard has to go.)
I’m greeted by Tara, my interviewee’s PA, who informs me that I will have a mere half-hour with my subject, Deputy Eoin O’Broin, the Sinn Fein party’s spokesman on housing. I’m led through the (literal) corridors of power to the floor where Sinn Fein deputies are located. There’s a tapestry on the wall just as you get out of the lift. It says, ‘United Ireland’ and there’s an arrow pointing at the SF offices.
The reason I’m here is to do a (now rather truncated) interview with Eoin. He’s written a book called ‘Flats And Cottages’ which is all about the emerging Irish Free State’s attempt to manage the housing crisis in Dublin in the 1930s/’40s and 50s. (Things change, things stay the same…) I’m not all that interested in either ‘Social policy’ or Architecture, for that matter, so I was rather surprised to be absolutely engaged by his book. It’s not exactly Jack Higgins, Lee Child or Dan Brown but there is a real plot, a hero, different characters and it even starts with an explosion. (Or technically an implosion.)
Eoin guides me.
“In early 20th Century Dublin, still under British rule, there were working class people who, because the city was where the work was, were housed in buildings that were never designed to house families in mass numbers. The people who originally owned these properties had moved out of the city and developers bought the properties up and rented them to low-wage workers. These houses became what we now refer to as tenements.
Conditions were positively Dickensian, there were entire families living in one room, often with no running water or toilet facilities and the infant mortality rate in these families was amongst the highest in Europe. And, occasionally, as I cite in the book about the tenement collapse on Church Street, entire structures, never built for dense occupation, just actually just fell down. And people died.”
By the 1930s it was clear something had to be done. Ireland had thrown off the shackles of British Rule but now it was clear that The State had to address this serious issue. Both Government and local housing committees had to work together to find a way to solve the growing problem. Put most simply, working-class people needed decent and safe housing. Such a thing had never been attempted before. Enter the hero of our story.
Eoin continues.
“Herbert Simms was an Englishman who had served as an artillery officer in the First World War, a working-class man who had risen through the ranks. At the war’s end he studied architecture and eventually re-located to Ireland where he became, in time, Dublin Corporation’s chief architect. Tasked to design homes for Dublin’s workers, he studied accommodations in Liverpool, Manchester, Amsterdam and Vienna. That’s an important distinction as I say it, really.
Simms was interested in homes as much as houses or flats. For Simms, it was about re-creating a community in spaces and locations that, in many ways, might replicate the shared community of the previous tenements, but with better living conditions and facilities. And these had to be inner-city domiciles. People had to be able to walk to work. What we now call suburbs couldn’t exist then. It had to be ‘Inner City’ housing on a mass scale.”
The amazing thing is that Simms designed and did that. It wasn’t without its problems. In Ireland at the time, more modern building methods such as prefabrication were not common practice.
More from Eoin.
“But that’s just why his buildings and estates and complexes worked! He used actual bricks and not only that, he brought, and this is purely down to Herbert Simms, a kind of aesthetic that made the buildings look nice! Obviously functionality was a prime issue, but Simms’ genius was that he supplied that while making his creations really nice places to live. They looked nice! And they still do today, those that are left.”
Let’s open the book again?
One of the best things about Eoin O’Broin’s book is that he visits the places he writes about and more importantly, meets the people who live there. Some for generations indeed. And some things have changed while other things haven’t very much? To Dubliners like me, of a certain age, we remember the 1980s when some of Herbert Simms’ creations were almost literal ‘no go’ areas. Oliver Bond, Theresa’s Gardens, Pearse House…
Eoin frowns.
“Yes, the economic collapse in the late 1970s and early ’80s hit working-class communities hardest of all. And the arrival of heroin didn’t help matters. But, in the main, those communities prevailed and survived, despite that mayhem. And it must be noted that the Government of the day, including an under-resourced Garda force did little or nothing to combat that situation.
Mass unemployment, workers on extremely low pay and the arrival of heroin was something of a ‘Perfect Storm’? But, you’ve read the book, the majority of people in those estates policed those problems themselves. We heard about the sometimes desperate and heavy-handed actions of ‘Concerned Parents Against Drugs’ but we didn’t hear about the local treatment facilities, totally unfunded by the Government, that communities set up themselves. People trying to protect and help their own kids? The people I talk to in my book remember that, the ones who were there.”
Is it better now?
“I think it might possibly be worse…”
That stops me. I have questions. But the cell-phone upon the table ‘chirps’ reminding me that my half hour is up. (I later find it amusing that O’Broin is happy to quit an interview with a journalist who is in his office to help him promote his book. That doesn’t seem to be his priority today.) I kind of respect that. I’m not sure what TDs do all day but this one appears to be up to his arse. I’d have liked more time. Eoin’s PA Tara escorts me back down to the real world. She says, “He’s really busy, it’s not personal…”
I might probably mention that Flats And Cottages is a really good book. The text says more than I can hint at here, particularly the interviews and the photographs by Mal McCann illustrate a beauty in our commonplace city-scape that we take so much for granted that we generally don’t even notice. We travel to other places and notice the buildings and imagine the people therein but we don’t see it so much where we live? It seems ordinary to us but it isn’t really. It looks like a nice place to live.
Words: Stephen Stone
Flats and Cottages: Herbert Simms and the Housing of Dublin’s Working Class, 1932–1948 is out now on Merrion Press.
