A puzzle: how to modernise a listed flats complex without reducing the number of homes in it

Retrofitting Pearse House – a social housing complex in the heart of the south inner-city – has hit a snag.

The Department of Housing has asked Dublin City Council to review its designs for the project.

The council’s planned regeneration of four of the blocks had been due to start next January.

But plans on the table would mean the number of flats in blocks L, M, N and P of the complex would fall from 78 to 44.

A Department of Housing spokesperson says that it cannot support a proposal that would mean a loss of 34 homes.

In September, council senior architect Sean Moylan told the council’s South East Area Committee that the council couldn’t add extra floors onto the blocks, because it is a protected structure.

That status has made these works more challenging, a council spokesperson said last Tuesday.

So too has the fact that the flats in the blocks are smaller than they should be under the council’s development plan, they said. “So, current homes need to be amalgamated to provide homes of the required size.”

Difficulties in retrofitting Pearse House are reigniting a debate around whether it is possible to make the city’s older social housing complexes – including other Simms-designed ones – into warm and healthy homes, while respecting their status as protected structures.

The council has about 2,000 flats across 18 complexes that are listed as protected structures or of historical interest, designed by city architect Herbert Simms, according to a council presentation.

There aren’t any plans to delist the Pearse House buildings, which were designed and built by Simms between 1936 and 1938, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said.

Sinn Féin Councillor Kourtney Kenny said that while protecting Simms’ work as a part of the city’s heritage is important, in a housing crisis, it would seem to go against his drive to provide homes.

“If he thought that people were being stopped from accessing comfortable, safe homes, he’d tear them down himself,” she says.

Until the council can provide a more satisfactory design for the first phase of this refurbishment project, the department is unwilling to release funding for the planning and procurement stage, Kenny said.

The council’s design team is now going back to look at other strategies to see if it can add more flats, a spokesperson said.

Simms city

In early 2018, the council announced that it was developing a strategy to regenerate apartment complexes that were 40 years or older across the city.

It counted more than 6,300 flats across 109 schemes that had been built before 1979, said a regeneration strategy drawn up by the former Deputy Chief Executive Brendan Kenny and Executive Manager Tony Flynn in March 2018.

Most of these were built from the 1930s onward, the report said, including Pearse House. By 2018, it had 345 flats across sixteen four-storey blocks, the report said.

But of these Simms-designed buildings, the four blocks which are due to be regenerated in the first phase of works, are protected structures, making the task tricky – and even leading to calls to delist the buildings.

In November 2018, councillors on the housing committee had agreed to a motion from Chris Andrews, then a Sinn Féin councillor, calling on the council to start the process of delisting Pearse House. But the blocks are still listed on the record of protected structures.

The difficulties of the regeneration and how to go about it have remained a point of contention among councillors, including when the designs for blocks L, M, N and P were discussed at the South East Area Committee this past September.

They couldn’t add new floors to make up for the flats lost by knocking some them together to meet modern standards for how big homes should be, due to its status as a listed building, council senior architect Sean Moylan told the committee.

Independent councillor Mannix Flynn said in response that, “If Mr Simms was alive today, he’d be the first one to demolish the blocks, and rebuild an entire opportunity for a new generation.”

Kenny said the same on Monday. It isn’t a case that the council shouldn’t be paying its dues to Simms’ legacy, she said. “But, Herbert Simms would pull them down and start again.”

But, on Tuesday evening, a council spokesperson said the protected status of the blocks would in itself not necessarily limit the ability to provide extensions to the existing building,

###Back to the drawing board

The regeneration of Pearse House is at the “pre-planning” stage one, and the council had planned to be on site in the winter of 2026 with the four blocks completed by autumn 2027, according to a council presentation.

But when the council submitted its stage-two planning and procurement application to the Department of Housing, the department highlighted its concerns on the loss of 34 homes, a council spokesperson said on 8 April.

The council lowered the number of flats because many of the smaller flats need to be combined to make larger ones that meet modern standards, they said.

But “this would result in Dublin City Council having to find permanent alternative accommodation for 34 families”, said a Department of Housing spokesperson.

The council told the department that its integrated design team will review its strategy for the complex, they said, “in order to examine all strategies for delivering the project that preserves the number of homes including deep refurbishment of all 78 flats in these blocks.”

A spokesperson for the council said its design team will look at whether there is an alternative for adding more homes. That review is ongoing, they said.