Abercrombie

This is a good article from today’s Irishman’s Diary in the Times by Hugh Oram

The recently erected Spire of Dublin has focused attention on the Corporation’s ambitious plans to regenerate the capital’s main street. But if an architect and town planner from Merseyside, Patrick Abercrombie, had had his way nine decades ago, the Dublin of today would bear little resemblance to what we see today. Instead of the Spire in O’Connell Street, we would have had a grand metropolitan cathedral at the top of Capel Street with a 500-foot column, a modern version of a round tower, topped by a statue of St Patrick.

Abercrombie’s plan, drawn up when he was working in the school of architecture at Liverpool University, was devised with two colleagues, Arthur and Sydney Kelly. The three entered a competition to plan a revitalised city of Dublin run in conjunction with the 1913 Civics Exhibition in the city. They won the prize of £500, a substantial sum, that in those days could have bought a very decent-sized house in the city.

However, the results of the Dublin competition weren’t made public until October, 1916, when the populace had other things on its mind. It was finally published, in book form, in December 1922, just as the new State was coming into being. Dublin of the Future described the capital as a city of magnificent possibilities, marred by the juxtaposition of incongruities and squalor.

New cathedral

Abercrombie had been much influenced by the work of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and his vast improvements in 19th-century Paris. One of the key elements of his vision was a new Roman Catholic cathedral to replace the Pro-Cathedral. He sited it near what is now DIT Bolton Street and its glorious Florentine entrance would have faced down Capel Street towards the Liffey.

At the back of the cathedral, Abercrombie designed a gigantic plaza, complete with a series of cenotaphs honouring famous Irishmen. The whole edifice was to be linked to the Kings Inns, while the statue of St Patrick high above the roof would have been visible from many parts of the city, like today’s Spire. Abercrombie boldly planned to have Henrietta Street, with its 18th-century houses, demolished to make way for his new cathedral.

He also designed a new national theatre for Cavendish Row, near where the present Gate Theatre stands, and he wanted the building to close off the view at the top of O’Connell Street. He planned to extend Amiens Street station down to the river, remove Butt Bridge, turn the Custom House into the new GPO and rebuild everything in the vicinity of the Custom House with new buildings in the Beaux Arts style, all taller than the Custom House. He proposed downgrading O’Connell Street to a secondary route.The plan also envisaged the old parliament buildings at College Green being turned into the new seat of government, with a new block for State administration at the corner of Westmoreland Street and Aston Quay.

Central railway station

On the north side of the river, between Capel Street and the Four Courts, he proposed a new central railway station, linked to Phoenix Park by a wide boulevard.

Nor were the suburbs spared. He planned to create radial routes across the city, widening many streets in the process, such as Northumberland Road in Ballsbridge. He also suggested that Dublin should have 14 neighbourhood parks and that 10 neighbourhood centres should be built. In other respects, too, the plan was prescient: he said that Dublin’s most urgent problem was rehousing 60,000 people living in deplorable tenements and highlighted the possibilities of developing districts such as Cabra and Crumlin.

The plan extended to industry. He proposed building a “power citadel” at the Pigeon House, saying that it was pointless carting coal to every factory in Dublin when it could all be converted to power at the point where it came into Dublin port.

The report was majestically designed and printed, awash with maps and photographs, but it was destined to sit on a shelf in Dublin Corporation for years. Yet Abercrombie was invited back to remake the city again in his imagination, just as another World War was starting.

Between 1939 and 1941, he produced a second, more modest plan together with Sydney Kelly and Manning Robertson, a Dublin-based town planner. This time, he moved the proposed new cathedral to the Ormond Quay area and placed a new civic centre to the immediate west of Parliament Street. He wanted a new central bus station on Aston Quay, and new bridges upstream and downstream from O’Connell Bridge. He proposed that satellite towns should be developed in such areas as Clondalkin, Lucan and Tallaght.

In other respects, too, he was ahead of his time, saying the city should avoid the piecemeal redevelopment of Georgian areas. He warned against the type of development that had happened in the recent past on Rathmines Road, which he described as an object lesson in chaotic building.

Distinguished career

This second report met the same neglected fate as the first. Yet despite his Dublin disappointments, Abercrombie enjoyed a very distinguished career in town planning in Britain.

He was professor of civic design at Liverpool University from 1915 until 1935, when he went to London University as professor of town planning. After the destruction of the second World War his large-scale town planning ideas were put into practice with the rebuilding of bombed-out areas of London, Plymouth and other English cities. He also did much work on the creation of new towns such as Welwyn Garden City and was greatly involved in the establishment of the London area Green Belt.

In Dublin, Abercrombie’s work is merely a great historical might-have-been, just two more reports that were never translated into practical action. Yet in Britain, he is still regarded as a father of modern town planning and for his services, he was knighted in 1945, becoming Sir Patrick Abercrombie.

HUGH ORAM