Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,
Cork Independent, 22 November 2012
“Technical Memories (Part 36) –Future Housing Debates”
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”. A large portion of his paper was concerned with tenement housing and the need to plan for the future for proper housing in the city.
In referring to the tenement houses in Cork City, Coakley’s lecture stated that some of them were so old and dilapidated, and so structurally bad, that repairing them was out of the question. As a consequence, 38 to 40 houses were closed some years previously as being unfit for human habitation. There were several instances of where the father and mother, and sons and daughters over 20 years of age, all slept in the same apartment. Of 12,850 houses in Cork, 1,300 were unprovided with back yards, nearly half of which were situated in the city centre. Coakley noted that if the Corporation of Cork were to demolish all the houses in the city which are absolutely unfit for human habitation and those on the border line, it would mean dispossessing 16,000 people, or one fifth of the population.
In Cork much attention had been given to the subject of poor housing in the previous thirty years. A committee of the Corporation of Cork had been formed to deal with the issues and it was continually pressing for a State grant for housing. The Corporation had, during the previous thirty years, expended £81,000 in clearing unhealthy and dilapidated areas, and providing some 532 houses, and 11 houses of 33 flats for the labouring classes. Since 1906 the Corporation had spent over £51,000 in re-surfacing the streets. The question of widening certain streets was also under consideration. Improvements had been carried out at Friary Lane, French’s Quay, and Windmill Road.
D.J. Coakley proposed a number of considerations, which in time were to become part of a wider strategy to deal with slums in Cork City in the 1920s to 1940s. Firstly, he proposed that unsanitary houses could be removed at the expense of the rate-payers and the building of others in their place. He gave the example, in London of Bethnal Green, where 15 acres of slums had been cleared at a cost of £280,000. Between the years 1893 and 1897, 5,719 inhabitants were displaced there. Similar but smaller schemes had been carried out in cities such as Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester. The Corporation of Liverpool had replaced over 500 unsanitary back to back hovels by healthy well planned tenement blocks opening on to wide courts. The disadvantages of Coakley’s method, he noted himself, were numerous- the high price for land, the compensation to the slum owners, and the high working expenses. In general during a clearance the slum dwellers were driven into some other part of the town where new slums could be created. He noted: “The rents in the district where they go are forced up, which causes the compensation price for the latter to be increased when it comes to be cleared. Indeed, that method of dealing with our slums has encouraged the development of the buying up of property in unsanitary areas in order to reap a rich harvest of compensation from the municipal pocket”.
A second method, proposed by D.J Coakley included the mending or ending of unsanitary houses at the expense of the owners. It was generally impossible according to Coakley, to achieve this end without removing one or more of the adjacent buildings, because the most unsanitary houses of all were generally found in thickly built neighbourhoods. For houses unfit for human habitation, notice was served on the owners to repair them at their own expense. If repairs were not carried out the magistrate could make a closing order. They could then be closed until repaired or demolished. The cost of replacing hovels with good cheap houses under the second method worked out in Liverpool at £7 per house of five persons. This was cheaper than the average £50 per head for the first method of creating a new house. The second method was in force in Birmingham, Sheffield, Birkenhead, Northampton, Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, Warrington, and York. Liverpool followed the first method up to 1905, when they found it too expensive. In Birmingham the owners received every encouragement to carry out the repairs. When notices to repair or close their houses were sent to owners their local authority frequently told them what was exactly required, to save them expense, in many cases supplying them with specifications of the work required.
Coakley’s third proposal consisted of the construction of new houses in the suburbs, under proper town-planning arrangements. In that case, there was no heavy expense for compensation to the owners and for clearances, and the price of the land was smaller than in the centre of the city. According to this method a cheap but well-built house, with a quarter acre garden or at least a fair-sized courtyard could be obtained. In time, this scheme was adopted more so than Coakley’s first two proposals in green areas such as Turners Cross in the late 1920s.
To be continued….
Caption:
668a. Cornmarket Street, 1890 (source: Cork City Through Time by Kieran McCarthy and Dan Breen, 2012)