TD 1
More from Eoin. “But that’s just why his building
s 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.” 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, Pearce House... 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. 22 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 underresourced 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 cellphone 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. Flats and Cottages: Herbert Simms and the Housing of Dublin’s Working Class, 1932–1948 is out now on Merrion Press.