An Irishman’s Diary on urban planning and the 1914 Civic Exhibition

Even in this “decade of centenaries”, it is extraordinary that 2014 was allowed to pass without anyone noticing that it marked the 100th anniversary of the first major town planning exhibition in Dublin – arguably the beginning of a whole new profession, another conspiracy against laypeople.

As architect Philip Crowe noted in a paper for UCD, this “vast pop-up exhibition” sought to engage the public so it was “more like a civic festival with fireworks, a ballroom, playground, outdoor exhibits, and rooms for refreshments, concerts, lectures and competitions in musical performance, dancing, gymnastics and butter-making”.

Inspired by Patrick Geddes, who Crowe describes as a “social ecologist”, the 1914 Civic Exhibition aimed to generate ideas about the future of Dublin, encouraging citizens to imagine how the city – then in the grip of social and economic upheaval, with a housing crisis second to none – might be improved in the decades ahead.

Inner city

Appalling slums in the inner city were the subject of a damning report by a committee of inquiry into “the housing conditions of the working classes in the city of Dublin” – championed by Lady Aberdeen, wife of the British lord lieutenant, who invited town planning pioneer Geddes (a friend and fellow Scot) to organise the exhibition.

It was held in Temple Gardens – now a public park in front of King’s Inns, maintained by Dublin City Council – and the Linenhall Barracks, just to the south, which was burned during the 1916 Rising and later demolished. Access to the exibition was via Henrietta Street, which by then had some of Dublin’s most squalid tenements.

“The event was opened by a procession of dignitaries through the city centre with much pageantry and reportedly received 9,000 visitors on the opening day. Special trains brought people from outside the capital and department stores ran ‘Exhibition Sales’ for the duration,” Crowe writes. It also included a summer school on civics.

The centrepiece was a Cities and Town Planning show, put on by Geddes, documenting the evolution of cities throughout the world, including a detailed survey of Edinburgh, his adopted home town, and the beginnings of a civic survey for Dublin. It would take another 10 years, however, before the Dublin survey was completed.

Town planning

There was also a Dublin town planning competition, although the brief made it clear that the organisers “do not feel that they are as yet in a position to foresee the requirements and future development of Dublin with sufficient definiteness to justify them in promising to recommend for execution any of the town plans which may be submitted . . .”

First prize went to Patrick Abercrombie, from the influential School of Civic Design in Liverpool, whose scheme imagined how Dublin would look if it was reconfigured along the lines of Haussmann’s Paris, with wide avenues culminating in monumental public buildings. He also proposed new social housing estates in Crumlin and Cabra.

As Crowe notes, many of the ideas explored in the relatively few (only eight) entries for the competition are still under discussion today, such as underground rail interconnectors and landscaping the Liffey quays.

The outbreak of war put most of the proposals on ice, but some were dusted down in the aftermath of 1916 and the Civil War.

It really is quite remarkable how the great public buildings and most of O’Connell Street and some of the adjoining streets were rebuilt in such grand style under the relatively impoverished first government of the Irish Free State – and during a decade that also saw the initiation of Dublin’s earliest “garden city” housing scheme in Marino.

Coincidentally, last October also marked the 50th anniversary of the 1963 Planning Act coming into force. A recently published book, Sense of Place: A History of Irish Planning, traces how well – and often, how badly – we've managed since, with author Seán O'Leary returning again and again to Ireland's anarchic anti-planning culture.

‘Social engineers’

O’Leary, who is director of the Irish Planning Institute, quotes economist Patrick Lynch in 1960: “Planning is unpopular in Ireland . . . Such are the unreasoning attitutes towards it that the term is often used as an emotive one, suggestive of voices signalling the road to serfdom, or speaking the foreign accent of social engineers.”

It would appear that Geddes, Abercrombie and the redoubtable Lady Aberdeen were so infused by their own idealism that they didn’t pick up on this peculiar Irish trait.

City, Assembled: A Moving Panorama Inspired by the Dublin Civic Exhibition 1914 will be on show at the City Assembly House, South William Street, from January 26th to February 8th.