Crampton Buildings, Temple Bar.
When we think of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling Company (DADC), Portobello and Stoneybatter come to mind first. In both places you’ll find rows of redbrick artisan cottages that are synonymous with the semi-philanthropic housing body who transformed the face of parts of Victorian Dublin.
Still, there is evidence of their work right in the heart of the city too, including the recently restored Crampton Buildings of Temple Bar. Located on Asdill’s Row, you could easily miss this housing scheme amidst the hustle and bustle of what is now Tourist Mecca, but at the time of their construction in the early 1890s was very much an industrial quarter.
The DADC, created in the mid 1870s, was intended to construct houses for Dublin workers at reasonable costs and with affordable rents. In the absence of Dublin Corporation housing projects (the first Corporation housing project was undertaken on Benburb Street in the late 1880s), workers were almost entirely at the mercy of private landlords, a rather unscrupulous group in Victorian Dublin which even included elected Councillors. It was a former Dublin Lord Mayor, Alderman Joseph Meade, who would gain much from subdividing homes on Henrietta Street.
Google Maps view of Crampton Buildings while under major restoration. The scheme has a ‘U shape’, with residential units entered from Asdill’s Row. Elephant and Castle and other businesses occupy the commercial units. (Image Credit: Google Maps 3d view)
As Murray Fraser has noted in his history of public housing in Ireland, the DADC was backed by “the city’s Unionist business elite”, which included Arthur Edward Guinness, Edward Cecil Guinness (later Lord Iveagh, who would play his own part in constructing social housing with the Iveagh Trust), William La Touche and John Jameson. Fraser notes that while the body received some state assistance, “from the outset the DADC was run as an efficient business and paid a dividend of between 4 and 5 percent to shareholders.” It may have set out to building affordable houses for the working class of Dublin, but it was a business.
By 1900 the company had built about 2,500 separate dwellings, though as Joseph V. O’Brien noted, “the Dwellings Company generally conducted its operations outside the so-called central areas of poverty and dilapidated housing.” DADC homes were far superior to the tenements that dotted the city centre, but the rent tended to exclude ‘general labourers’, and meant that as such they attracted tradesmen, skilled labourers, and those lucky enough to enjoy regular employment with companies like Guinness, a far-cry from the precarious nature of much work in the city.
For some, the DADC houses came at just the right time. As Cormac Ó Gráda has noted in his study of Jewish Ireland, “the brand-new houses in Portobello came on the market at exactly the right time for clusters of Jewish migrants ready to pay the 6s to 8s weekly rent.”
The Asdill’s Row scheme, named Crampton Buildings, consists of 54 flats, with 27 each units each across the first and second floor levels. It was completed in 1891, and was constructed with retail usage at ground level in mind. At first they struggled to fill these units, perhaps unsurprising given the very different nature of the district at the turn of the nineteenth century. As with most DADC schemes, the Crampton Buildings outlived the body, and were purchased in the 1990s by Dublin City Council, who recently undertook major restoration of the scheme. Having been hidden beyond view by hoardings for much of last year, this great DADC project is visible once again, and looking better than ever.
