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R Flats And Cottages is a fully illustrated explo
ration of the incredible career and legacy of Herbert Simms, Dublin’s first dedicated housing architect. WORDS Stephen Stone USE I n 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 halfhour 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 21