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‘The convenience of the location cannot be overstated. Within a short walk of Grafton Street, St Stephen’s Green and Christchurch”. The ads on property websites for houses in the Tenters area of Dublin 8 contain the usual estate-agent hyperbole. They could be describing fashionable mews in Dublin 2 or trendy apartments in Temple Bar, but in this case they are referring to one of Dublin’s most ambitious public housing schemes, built when the country was on its knees, but which is still standing proud, nearly a hundred years later.
“We were coming out of a Lockout, a World War, the Rising” , says Cathy Scuffil, historian in residence for Dublin south city, “yet Dublin Corporation still managed to build houses”.
Although I’ve lived on the edge of the Tenters for the last 15 years, I’ve only recently discovered that the estate was once called Fairbrothers Fields, and that it was built in response to what was described as the “worst housing crisis in the British Isles”.
The scheme was part of a citywide project first proposed in 1912, but given urgency by the collapse of the Church Street tenements in 1913, which killed seven people, left 100 homeless and forced a public inquiry, which put the spotlight on the horrific housing conditions in Dublin.
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Plans were produced for four different schemes and the British treasury promised £4 million. The 1916 Rising halted the project, as money was redirected to rebuild central Dublin, and Alderman Kelly, one of the proponents of the scheme, found himself in jail.
According to Scuffil, who has dug around the city archives, once Alderman Tom Kelly was released, he threatened to get an American loan, which embarrassed the treasury into producing the money. In April 1918 a tender was accepted for the first project at Spitalfields off Francis Street.
“If you look up at the gables you see plaques with the years 1918 and 1919. The first houses were completed in less than a year,” says Scuffil. “When you were handed a key, you were handed a light bulb. One.”
The next development was St James’s Walk, also known as Colbert’s Fort, followed by Ceannt Fort near St James’s Hospital. The Fairbrothers Fields site was next. The Fairbrothers are believed to have been Quakers and the site had been used for market gardening. The old name for the area, the Tenters, which is back in vogue, comes from the earlier practice of drying linen stretched across wooden frames known as tenters.
Local historian Maria O’Reilly now lives in Cow Parlour, less than a hundred yards from where she grew up on O’Curry Road, where her mother still lives. Her great-grandparents moved into the house in 1922.
“It must have been like winning the Lotto,” she says.
“The corporation stipulated that houses should have a parlour. It was viewed as a mental health issue. People had been living in one or two rooms, on top of each other.”
Walking the streets of the Tenters, what’s particularly noticeable is the variety of housing styles, and the use of corner sites and small culs-de-sacs to break up long frontages, as well as the quality of the building materials, such as granite, Dolphin’s Barn brick, and proper sash windows. Houses also had a front and back garden. The estate was also the first tenant-purchase scheme in the new State.
Whereas the Spitalfields project of 1918 stuck with the old street names, the greenfield sites gave the Corporation free rein. The streets in Ceannt Fort – named after Eamonn Ceannt – carry the names of every volunteer killed in the South Dublin Union in 1916.
By the time Fairbrothers Fields was completed there was a shift in direction, according to O’Reilly, who says it took two years to decide on the names.
St Thomas’s Road is a nod to an abbey that had stood nearby, but other names reflected Irish history and culture. Oscar Square is not named after Oscar Wilde, but rather Oscar, son of Oisín of Na Fianna. Clarence Mangan Road was named for the poet, and O’Carolan Road for the harpist, perhaps obvious choices for a new state. But O’Curry, O’Donovan, Geoffrey Keating, and Petrie were less predictable, named for less well-known antiquaries, historians and philologists who had helped create a new sense of Irish identity and nationhood.
Nearly a century later, cranes dominated the landscape around the Tenters this summer, and Oscar Square was full of the parked cars of builders. They weren’t working on public housing, but building expensive student accommodation and a new Aloft Hotel. The hotel will contain the old Tenters pub, with the marketing-speak saying it “will reflect all that is traditional in a contemporary manner”. The soul of the Tenters is elsewhere, however, in the communal residents parties, the afternoon kickabouts and evening dog meet-ups on Oscar Square, and the chats while waiting for the 150 bus.
The days of swathes of vacant city land being used to provide ambitious public housing for its residents seem as archaic as the manuscripts pored over by O’Donovan and Petrie. While the recently announced land agency has earmarked nearby Newmarket Square for development, only 10 per cent will be designated as social housing and a further 30 per cent as so-called “affordable homes”. As Cathy Scuffil says, where is our Alderman Kelly now?