Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 15 November 2012

“Technical Memories (Part 35) –A No Man’s Land”

In 1926 the Cork Town Planning Association produced Cork: A Civic Survey, which provided a template for Cork Corporation’s housing developments at Capwell, Turner’s Cross, Gurranabraher, and other suburban sites. The committee associated with the technical education in the city had pressed for such a document for several years previously. Indeed, apart from the Schools of Commerce, and Music, and the Crawford Technical College, their management committees also took a huge interest in the condition of the housing from where many of their students came from.

Beginning at the opening of the 1917-18 session of the Cork Municipal School of Commerce, the Principal D.J. Coakley, delivered a lecture on the “General Principles of Housing and Town Planning”. The lecture, which was published in pamphlet form, by the Cork County Borough Technical Instruction Committee comprised an enormous amount of data for debate on the subject. Indeed in the printed version, now archived in local studies in Cork City Library, the introduction is penned by Arthur F. Sharman Crawford. He notes: “All the labour expended on educating the citizens in schools would be more or less thrown away if afterwards the workers had to live in over-crowded unsanitary dwellings. People living under such circumstances naturally become slack and enervated, and unfit to perform their duties with efficiency. At present, houses were built more or less haphazard, and without any properly formulated general plan. There was no doubt when the dreadful war was over, schemes of housing and town planning would be undertaken in all large cities”.

Sharman Crawford writes of the considerable amount of valuable information collected relative to the condition of housing in the city and that the Corporation of Cork had discussed the preparation of a housing scheme for Cork and the holding of a Local Government Board Inquiry into the topic. He called for a competition for the best plan for the future development of the city, and that a prize be offered of sufficiently large size to attract the “very best brains” in the subject of housing and town planning. In addition Crawford pressed for an educational side to the subject, which could be undertaken by University College Cork and by the Technical Instruction Committee, who could arrange a series of lectures on housing and town planning, so that the citizens could understand for themselves the necessity for the work and “become ambitious to have a beautiful and sanitary city”.

A series of charts and maps mapping out social and housing problems in the city had been arranged by the city engineer in City Hall a few years previous to 1917. These had been exhibited a few years previously at the Dublin Civics Exhibition, and were highly appreciated by well-known expert Professor Patrick Geddes, of Edinburgh. Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology. Indeed several of his ideas were adopted in compiling Cork: A Civic Survey in 1926 (see next week).

In Sharman Crawford’s pamphlet, he writes that during the session, 1914-15, a course of public lectures on citizenship was arranged by the Cork Municipal School of Commerce committee. The lectures had an important bearing on, and formed a necessary foundation, to a course of lectures on housing and town planning. The following lectures were delivered: Citizenship-Scope and General Treatment (by D.J. Coakley and A.F Sharman Crawford), The Rights and Duties of the Citizen (by D.J. Coakley and A F Sharman Crawford), History and Development of Government (by P.Kennedy),  The Tribal System (by W.F.P. Stockley), The Feudal System (by Dr. P.G. Lee), History and Extension of the Franchise and of Education (by P.Gamble), The Central Government of Great Britain (by H.J. Moloney), Parliamentary Procedure (by J.F. Burke), Local Municipal Government (by F.W. McCarthy), and The Government of France (by R.D. Jenkins).

Sharman Crawford goes on to describe in his pamphlet the condition of housing in other parts of Ireland such as Dublin and then focussed on the problems that existed in Cork City. In Cork City in 1917, the population of the city was 76,673 with 12,850 houses and 15, 469 families. The tenements occupied by the working classes were 719 with a population of 8,675 with 2,928 families. The report stated that overcrowding to a very great extent existed. In some cases, the cubic space of the sleeping apartments amounted to only 72 cubic feet for each person. Of the 2,383 houses other than tenement houses, 2,265 were found to be over-crowded.

There was a large proportion of the population living in overcrowded areas, as members of a family living in one of two-room houses, or inhabiting tenements. Crawford notes: “These tenement houses formerly built for one family, now occupied by from three to nine families, and even in one case by thirteen families, with a common entrance- a sort of no man’s land, naturally vitiated by neglect and dirt- are a natural breeding ground for disease of all kinds, and are a serious menace to the physical and moral condition of our people”.

To be continued…

Caption:

667a. Slum conditions in Kelly Street, Cork, c.1900 (source: Cork Museum)