Bulldozing Georgian Dublin: the battle between the ESB and those who wanted historic houses preserved

A short clip from a Teilifís Éireann news bulletin of April 1965 shows a group of brawny workmen, cigarettes dangling from their lips, battering several hundred years of Dublin’s Georgian architecture into rubble with sledge hammers.

The wrecking crews worked their way along the 16 old houses, razing one after the other, sending the old red bricks, ancient timbers and other relics of the late 18th century tumbling to the street below.

The houses were an integral part of the longest Georgian streetscape in existence, a mile-long stretch of 62 houses on Lower Fitzwilliam Street with 44 changes of brickwork, proportions and levels, stretching from Holles Street to Baggot Street, perfectly framing the foothills of the Dublin Mountains in the distance.

Ironically the Georgian houses that architect Sam Stephenson said “were not designed to last more than a lifetime” are still remembered all these years later  whereas the office block he and Arthur Gibney designed to replace them was demolished a little more than 50 years  after it became one of the most reviled modern buildings in Dublin.

Now as the scaffolding comes down from its shiny brick, glass and steel replacement, people still haven’t fully forgiven the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and its political cheerleaders for tearing down an irreplaceable part of the city’s Georgian fabric.

Other acts of architectural vandalism were perpetrated in the name of profit and progress in the years before and after, but the destruction of this vista was probably the low point.

It was not just a battle of good and evil, or preservation and greed. It was also part of a ‘culture war’ before the term was invented.

In 1957 an unnamed government minister was reported by Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, as observing: “I was glad to see them go, they represented everything I hate” regarding two demolished Georgian buildings i n Kildare Street.

As the debate about Lower Fitzwilliam Street raged, the taoiseach Seán Lemass made no secret of his sympathies. “I am a complete modernist, ” he told the Dáil.  “We have enough museum pieces without looking for more.”

The members of the Irish Georgian Society were described as “a consortium of belted earls” and “outsiders” by the minister for local  Government in the early 1960s, the staunch republican Kevin Boland. “I make no apology for saying that the physical needs of the people may get priority over the aesthetic needs of Lord and Lady Guinness” he added, although Desmond Guinness was an ‘Hon’ rather than a lord and his lady, Mariga, was a princess and great-grandniece of Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

From a single drawing room in No 28 Lower Fitzwilliam Street first occupied in 1927, the ESB had spread its tentacles along the street and by December 1961 occupied all 16 Georgian townhouses from No 13 to No 28 and several others which were not part of its planned new headquarters. The ESB then held an international competition to design a replacement headquarters, which was won by Stephenson/Gibney in September 1962.

“Another attack is being made on our Dublin architectural heritage, the worst attack so far, ” declared Desmond Guinness, whose firebrand wife, Mariga, collected 10,000 signatures opposing the new building. Ordinary Dubliners joined the likes of the Marquess of Sligo, the Earl of Pembroke, Princess Grace (Kelly) of Monaco and Charlie Chaplin in expressing their displeasure at the project.

The ESB enlisted the aid of the eminent British architectural historian, John Summerson. He was scathing about the Dublin streetscape. Lower Fitzwilliam Street, he described as “one damned house after another” and of “negligible historic and architectural value.” In the preservation corner Albert Richardson of the Royal Academy was equally trenchant in arguing for the street’s preservation.

Neil Blaney, who had succeeded Boland as minister for local government, and whose approval was needed for the demolition to proceed, was later portrayed as the villain. Initially he tried to avoid the destruction that followed and advocated that at least the Georgian facades should be preserved. He was eventually outmanoeuvred by the ESB, powerful bureaucrats in his department and political allies who genuinely wanted to detonate Dublin’s imperial past.

During a debate on the Local Government Planning and Development Bill in the Seanad on July 31, 1963, Professor William Bedell Stanford, a classical scholar,  asked: “Does the ESB desire to have a monument of ignominy and shame and tastelessness… a black patch on one of the most noble vistas in the city. It will become a notorious eyesore… if they go ahead this will become a kind of tourist anti-attraction.”

But Senator Tomás Ó Maoláin warned: “We do not want organised attempts to block progress. I do not believe there is any public objection so far to the progressive plans of the ESB for modern buildings in which their staff will have comfort and hygienic conditions.”

In a Dáil debate in November 1964, Richie Ryan said the proposed headquarters was “vandalism” perpetrated by the ESB, with the “connivance of the government”.  The Labour Party TD Seán Dunne was more lyrical: “If you walk on a Sunday morning from Holles Street Hospital towards the top of that Georgian prospect and see the Dublin Mountains at the end, if the sun is right, you cannot but feel that what you are looking at is a city, not of George II or George I, but at the city of Grattan, of Napper Tandy, of Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet and, coming down to later days, of mighty literary figures, Irish people who went out and stormed the literary citadels of the world and made us proud of the name of this city.”

There was also an undercurrent of fear, exploited by some unscrupulous developers to have perfectly good Georgian buildings torn down. On June 15, 1963, as the fate of Fitzwilliam Street was being debated  two young girls, Marie Varley (9) and Linda Byrne (8), were killed when two houses collapsed on Fenian Street.

With fears about the dangerous condition of other old houses, 155 families were displaced and many old buildings condemned. “There were cases where dangerous buildings, Georgian houses, fell down and killed people,” warned Fianna Fáil’s PJ Burke.

After five years of debate  Blaney signed the order allowing the ESB to go ahead with plans for its ‘brutalist’ new headquarters in September 1964, weeks before a new Planning Act might have saved them.

OnApril 5, 1965, on the eve of a general election  the destruction was under way. “The ESB knocked down the best vista in Dublin,” the writer Valerie Pakenham later lamented.

Oddly enough it eventually happened with hardly a murmur. Despite the vocal opposition , the long-drawn-out controversy and the lofty debates, it was only when the houses were gone that Dubliners realised what had been lost.

Perhaps one reason was that the Irish Georgian Society had so many other battles to fight. In particular members like Mariga Guinness and others put their money where their mouths were to save Mountjoy Square. They bought up Georgian houses strategically — she paid €5,000 for hers — just to thwart Matt Gallagher’s building firm,Leinster Estates, from bulldozing them.

In his book The Heart Of Dublin Peter Pearson recounts the aftermath with sadness recalling how “remarkable” fireplaces made by the Bossi family of Florence, doors, fanlights, architraves, shutters and panelling were sold off at an auction in Midleton, Co Cork, dispersed and lost forever in the name of progress.

In the end one house, No 29, was saved from the wrecking ball and under the supervision of architect Austin Dunphy, was restored to its Georgian grandeur and opened to the public in 1991.

A proposal by the ESB to convert it into three luxury apartments as part of its redevelopment plan has been refused by Dublin City Council.

The utility company also owns ten other Georgian buildings in the Fitzwilliam Street/Mount Street area. It is renovating them as part of its current project, with plans to reconvert eight to residential use — including the museum — and sell them. This plan has the support of Environment Minister Eamon Ryan.