If there is anything more depressing than a study of Dublin’s slums in detail it is a study of Dublin’s slum-dwellers…They look like people who have no healthy interests, no fresh and natural desires, nothing that the wildest imagination could call dreams; people who go through life as a narrow, burdensome, unintelligible pilgrimage; they have lost the capacity of sympathy, understanding and hope.
-From William Patrick Ryan’s The Pope’s Green Island, 1912.
Today is the 70th anniversary of the death of Herbert George Simms, Dublin’s pioneering Housing Architect. We have previously examined Simms in this piece on housing in 1930s Dublin. Much can be taken today from the work of Simms, who was responsible for the construction of some 17,000 new working class dwellings in his time in office, ranging from beautiful Art Deco flat schemes in the inner-city to new suburban landscapes. Speaking to a housing inquiry in 1935, Simms outlined his belief that “you cannot re-house a population of 15,000 people, as in the Crumlin scheme, without providing for the other necessities and amenities of life.” Future decades and failed projects have proven those words correct.
The death of Simms in September 1948 was tragic, with the architect throwing himself in front of a train near Coal Quay Bridge. His suicide note, which was rather curiously reprinted in the Irish Press newspaper, said “I cannot stand it any longer, my brain is too tired to work any more. It has not had a rest for 20 years except when I am in heavy sleep. It is always on the go like a dynamo and still the work is being piled on to me.”
To mark the anniversary of his passing, today we post this stunning image from the collections of Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive. It shows a familiar Dublin landmark, in the form of St. Michan’s Church, but also the meeting of two ages of housing in the Irish capital. On our right, we see the construction of the Greek Street flats. These flats were described in the press as being of “the most modern type….to us they recall photographs of municipal flat schemes from Berlin,Moscow or Vienna.” On the otherside, the tenement slums of Mary’s Lane remain. The image appeared in the Evening Mail, and captures the beginning of the work of Herbert Simms for Dublin.
Image Credit: Dublin City Public Libraries and Archives.
Simms will be honoured in October with the Simms120 conference, open to the public though registration is required:
