Herbert Simms was a hero who worked himself into an early grave to produce public housing for Dubliners in need during the toughest of times. As Dublin Corporation’s chief housing architect between 1932 and 1948, he designed and delivered 17,000 new homes in distinctive blocks of flats throughout the inner city as well as two-storey terraced “cottages” in Crumlin and Cabra.
In telling the story of how this happened, Eoin Ó Broin is happy to acknowledge that his grandparents and their children – one of whom was his father Seán – were among those fortunate to be rescued from terrible tenements and given new lives in homes they could call their own. He also draws lessons from Simms’s great endeavour to inform how we should deal with today’s housing crisis.
The book contains golden nuggets such as Jesuit priest Fr Michael McGrath warning in 1932 about “the moral danger of the common staircase” in blocks of flats, which he viewed as being “in line with the philosophy of Communism”. Also Simms’s beautiful drawings and annotated photographs, taken on his study trips of new flats in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Karl Marx Hof in faraway Vienna.
Extraordinarily, despite his prolific output of new housing in Dublin, there was very little coverage of it in contemporary newspapers, and then he was almost forgotten – perhaps because of the stigma of his suicide in 1948. The primary source on Simms remains an unpublished 1997 MA thesis by architect Eddie Conroy, who trawled through Dublin City Council’s archives for his material.
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Case studies of several of Simms’s schemes place tenants centre-stage, with evocative photographs by Mal McCann showing them and the places where they live – still habitable after nearly a century, but now in need of renovation to reduce energy costs. Sadly, the Department of Housing has rejected Dublin City Council’s plans to amalgamate flats as this would reduce the number of units.
Minister for Housing James Browne needs to read this wonderful book by his Sinn Féin opposite number to gain a real understanding of the value of Simms’s architectural legacy to Dublin. He can then break the bureaucratic impasse by agreeing to fund an “accelerated regeneration and retrofit programme”, as Ó Broin calls for, to ensure that the places Simms created last for another century or more.
