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)

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)

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 8 November 2012

“Technical Memories (Part 34) –Overarching Narratives”

Continuing on from last week, there are some interesting insights in the newspapers such as the Cork Examiner into housing and urban renewal in Cork in the mid 1920s. At a Council meeting on 19 September 1924, the principal business was to discuss the allocation of houses at a former Cattle Market site on College Road, which became known as Wycherley Terrace in time.

The architects Messrs. O’Flynn and O’Connor wrote to the Council’s housing committee stating that the Cattle Market housing scheme was ready for occupation. They were to be allotted to applicants in each city ward area in proportion to the number of proposals received from those areas. The secretary of the committee noted they had received 286 applications for the forty houses, and they were to be allotted according to the number of applications from each ward. The three areas of the North West Ward were be entitled to 19 houses, there been 138 applicants from those areas. The centre ward, with 89 applications, would be entitled to 13. The south ward was entitled to five houses, the number of applicants been 38, and the North East ward, from which 21 applications had been received, was entitled to three houses.

Cllr O’Riordan protested against the unfairness of the allocation so far as the north east ward was concerned, and another Cllr Horgan supported the protest, saying that it was something like ‘jerrymandering’. The chairman said the spirit of the Council’s decision was that the applications should be segregated, and the most deserving picked out in each area. The houses should then be given to the people who required them most. That cases where five or more lived in one room should be selected. Despite the councillors’ interventions the majority of the Council voted for the decision that the houses be allocated in proportion to the number of applications received. The councillor representatives of the different wards were to select the tenants for the houses allocated to those wards.

The culverts of the city are referred to in October 1924. Very little is known on the city’s culverts, many of which in the past straddled river channels of the Lee. Many in time became main streets in the city such s St Patrick’s Street. On the 14 October 1924, Mr Ryan, the Council’s Building Inspector, submitted a report to the City Councillors on the condition of the underground arch under St Patrick Street. He drew the Corporation’s Public Works committee to a number of defects. There was a noticeable increase in the tendency of the arch stone to slip. The side walls forming the abutments of the arch were in a wretched condition; in parts they resembled more a heap of stones loosely tipped from a cart than a wall systematically built. A considerable amount of silt helped to save those side walls from the scouring action of floods, and by its weight to retain them in position. The loose open joints of these walls admitted the free tunnelling of rats to adjoining premises. The continual working of the tide through these walls removed a certain amount of subsoil, and this the architect proposed would eventually lead to a subsidence of the adjoining ground with the drainage connections.

The unbraced concrete foundation of the pavement and the wood blocks above, both of which were atop the foundation over the arch saved it to a great extent. As the high tide level was much higher that the crown of the arch, the tide removed supporting soil. An amount of timbering or bracing had been fixed in the archway. The archway was the main sewer of the city, and received the sewage from all the sewers in the side streets; it’s bed was the old river bed and even if in good condition, it was self cleansing. The city’s tram lines were directly over it in places, and an amount of inconvenience would be experienced by the failure of any part of the arch.

On the subject of a culvert on Sheare Street, the architect noted several defects; “The crown of the arch is close to the surface of the road….The arch is affected by the impact of heavy laden lorry wheels. The arch varies in sectional area, and the change from one section to another is made by direct offsets, which slow down the flow and exposes the masonry to the scouring action of the floods. Where the sectional area of the arch is wide, as in spanning 16 to 20 feet, two lorries can travel abreast, transmitting practically all their weight to the arch”. The architect proposed that the arch be replaced with a new one of smaller span; that arch would be stronger and the weight transmitted to it less and it could have also be possible to obtain a greater depth between the road surface and crown of arch, which would facilitate the laying of gas, water of electric conduits, where they had to cross the arch. The architect concluded with options for replacing the archway with a pre-cast concrete pipe, a small brick sewer or concrete culvert.

To be continued…

Caption:

666a. Grand Parade Culvert, exposed February 2005 (picture: Kieran McCarthy)