The Oliver Bond flat complex has stood for 80 years now – more than twice the lifespan of the man after whom it was named. A wool merchant from east Donegal, the original Bond was a leading member of the United Irishmen in the 1790s, a fact that earned him first a spell in prison, for “seditious reflection”, and later a death sentence for treason.
He was 20 minutes from a scheduled rendezvous with the gallows, on July 30th, 1798, when the sentence was commuted. But the reprieve didn’t last long. The prisoner was found dead in his cell five weeks later, aged 39.
What’s left of him now resides among other celebrity republicans in the grounds of St Michan’s Church, off Dublin’s north quays. Since 1936, however, he has had a far more extensive monument just south of the river – 16 blocks of social housing that have been home to three generations and 10,000 people.
Built by an impoverished country in hard times, the Oliver Bond flats are arguably among the greatest achievements of independent Ireland. And Bond aside, they stand as monuments to another man who became an Irish martyr in his own way, although he was English.
Herbert George Simms was a London-born architect who worked in Dublin from the mid-1920s and was appointed to the new post of city housing architect in 1932. His time in the job coincided with Éamon de Valera’s first and epic spell in power. And in that period, Simms built 17,000 homes, ranging from inner-city flats to suburban estates in Cabra and Crumlin.
Almost all survive to this day. Alas, the man himself was broken in the effort. He took his own life, on the railway line in Dún Laoghaire, in September 1948. A suicide note spoke of the pressures of work.
Apart from their durability, Simms’s apartment blocks are also pleasing to the eye. If the Usher’s Island-Bridgefoot Street area is Dublin city centre’s ugliest, as a survey recently claimed, this is no fault of his.
He had studied best practice on mainland Europe and his buildings are all handsomely finished, often with Art Deco trimmings.
The Oliver Bond blocks, alphabetically named from A to T (some letters were mysteriously skipped, including J, K, and Q, which suggests the architects were using the Irish alphabet, although I is also excluded) stretch over an entire city block.
Their neighbours include Guinness. But they themselves occupy the former site of a brewery that was even older, the Anchor, founded in 1740, and later owned by a son of Daniel O’Connell, before its last incarnation, as Darcy’s. Rivalry with the giant of St James’s Gate was long and intense. There was a time when beer spilled over into politics, and vice versa. During the “Repeal” election of 1841, the O’Connell-Guinness rivalry led to widespread boycotting of the latter’s “Protestant Porter”.
So it may be ironic that having survived to see Irish independence, Darcy’s closed in 1926. Ten years later, the first of 300 young families were moving onto the site, from tenements north and south of the river. And 80 years on from that, in many cases, their descendants are still there.
The area has always been poor. What it didn’t lack, for much of the 20th century, were jobs. The surrounding streets hummed with industry once, especially textiles. Employers included the John Ireland sewing factory, which had the contract for Garda uniforms, and Jack Tuohy’s.
More skilled seamstresses did “invisible stitching” for Louis Copeland’s on Strand Street. The Winstanley shoe factory was a big employer too. If the locals couldn’t afford to buy some of the things they produced, the shoe-factory staff could always depend on Winstanley “seconds”.
Most industry evaporated in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, this area has suffered all the usual problems associated with inner-city Dublin. But unlike the Bridgefoot Street Flats – built decades later and yet demolished in 2003, when they were already beyond saving – the Oliver Bond apartments remain firmly intact, along with the community they serve.
The well-justified pride among residents is expressed in an 80th anniversary exhibition that opened recently and runs until December. It includes an outdoor display, on the perimeter railings, and an indoor exhibit, with archive, at the Robert Emmet Community Development Project offices on Usher’s Street. This month will also feature a number of public talks, at least one of which will pay due tribute to the heroic Simms. Details of these and other events are at recdp.ie