Institutional confinement and Grangegorman

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Dublin underwent a transformation in planning and redevelopment. Reflecting wider trends across the British empire in monumental architecture, vistas and promenade streets, groups such as the Wide Streets Commission replanned and ‘improved’ Dublin's city centre.Footnote ⁷ Transport links – the canal networks and large roads which encircled the city and provided vital routeways through it – were central to Dublin's urban ‘rationalization’,Footnote ⁸ a symptom of modernity overtaking the medieval city. The architects, planners and reformers associated with this period of development were inspired by the ideas of the European Enlightenment and informed by concepts of civic and social advancement.Footnote ⁹ As with other cities in the British Isles in the modern period, Dublin city was redeveloped and reorganized to reflect ideas of civic improvement. These ideas were inherent in the material fabric of the city, namely the widening of streets, the canalization of the River Liffey and the classification and separation of those elements of society which lay outside of the civic norm into dedicated public institutions.

The construction of ‘reformed’ institutions and the gradual development of an institutional district in Dublin's north city centre under the guidance of the city of Dublin and government of Ireland was the work of a small group of men. This group included local physicians and hospital managers, the Board of Control over the Dublin House of Industry, public works architect Francis Johnston and Charles Fitzroy, the fourth duke of Richmond and lord lieutenant of Ireland. The Dublin House of Industry, the first institution to be constructed in this area, was opened in 1773, after legislation was passed providing for the construction of such institutions to house and employ ‘helpless’ men, ‘disorderly’ women and the ‘idle’ and ‘strolling’ poor of both sexes.Footnote ¹⁰ The site was on the edge of the growing city, and though it was green-field when the House of Industry was built, Grangegorman has a long history of occupation. Its recent history included a medieval manor house (now demolished).Footnote ¹¹ John Rocque's 1756 map of the city of Dublin shows the site that would become the Dublin House of Industry as a series of planted fields, probably orchards, with a nunnery facing onto what was then called Channel Row (renamed Brunswick Street in the 1760s).Footnote ¹² The institution was established in 1773 on the back of a poor relief act, providing for the lodging and support of deserving poor; from 1777, the institution had some financial support from the stateFootnote ¹³ (likely by virtue of being in Dublin). Most Houses of Industry relied on local support, rather than any centralized fund.Footnote ¹⁴ The House of Industry became the central institution in the Grangegorman area up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the building was continuously added to from the outset, eventually expanding into several dedicated hospitals and asylums for disparate inmate types. In an effort to expand facilities for the classification of inmates, the House of Industry was responsible for defining the clinical character of the area.

Supplementary institutions allowed for increased and varied provision in the House of Industry. Early expansions included the Hardwicke Fever Hospital, to the south-east of the original workhouse building, which opened onto a courtyard, fronted on the south side by additional lunatic cells, and to the east by a convalescent hospital.Footnote ¹⁵ Another example was the Bedford Asylum for Industrious Children, which was constructed to the rear of the House of Industry in 1808. Three ranges were constructed around a courtyard and connected to the north wall of the House of Industry, to create an enclosed space. The Bedford was constructed for children over the age of five, who learned cloth and artisanal trades in workshops. When the House of Industry became overcrowded, therefore, the Bedford was quickly repurposed. By the 1830s, the Bedford housed the sick, the infirm and others not suited to industrious labour.Footnote ¹⁶ Far more successful and long-lived than many of its neighbours on the Grangegorman site was the Richmond Surgical Hospital, which survived in some form as a medical hospital until the early 1990s. A handsome red-brick hospital building in the English Renaissance style was constructed for the Richmond in 1901. Though an additional hospital building on an already institution-heavy site, the copper-domed bays and elaborate façade of this institution on the corner of Brunswick Street and Morningstar Avenue (the entrance to the workhouse, lunatic asylum and fever hospitals) became the most visible outward-facing element on the Grangegorman site.

When they were built and throughout the nineteenth century, these individual institutions relieved strain on the House of Industry, and catered for the specific needs of different classes of the public, and specifically the poor. With these needs catered for outside of the main building, the House of Industry could dedicate itself spatially and financially to housing paupers and managing vagrants. The Dublin House of Industry was run in a distinctive manner, an open institution with multiple facets, a kind of catch-all for the city of Dublin, before its incorporation into the new Poor Law Union in 1838, when it became the North Dublin Union Workhouse. The House of Industry was part of an active network of institutions for public confinement in Dublin. For example, two sick convicts were transferred from Newgate prison to the House of Industry in 1807 to be ‘secured’ in the Hardwicke Fever Hospital.Footnote ¹⁷ Staff of the House of Industry were frequently fined for rioting or drunkenness on the job, and were disciplined by the institution for their infractions, suggesting that even individuals employed in the House of Industry contributed to the undertaking of the institution to house and employ those who fell outside of the norms of industrial society. It is likely that staff of this kind exacerbated, rather than forwarded, the mission of the House of Industry. It is unclear what hiring policy was at work, but the servants may have been drawn from better-off beneficiaries of the institution. The House of Industry was one part of a wider network of relief institutions, however, which only expanded along with the city's population into the nineteenth century.

In the management of the poor and marginal in society, Ireland was like the rest of the British Isles, materially applying the ideals of reformers like Samuel Tuke, who wrote on moral management in asylums in the early nineteenth century, and John Howard, who wrote on prison reform and institutional buildings. Moral management was an approach to mental illness that involved engagement with patients on an individual basis, providing a comfortable space or mental environment in which to recover, if that were possible. In Ireland, the Grangegorman asylum applied this approach.Footnote ¹⁸ The institutions traditionally responsible for housing people who could not contribute to what Michel Foucault called the ‘imperative of labour’ in an increasingly industrialized cityscapeFootnote ¹⁹ saw significant development and reform during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. The Penitentiary Act of 1779 saw the implementation of the ideas of reformer John Howard. The built environment of the ‘reformed prison’ generated significant public attention. Jeremy Bentham's ‘Panoptic’ prison, designed for the self-regulation of inmates and along the lines of Howard's reforms, became a matter of media and public interest.Footnote ²⁰ Though legislation providing for prison reform did not reach Ireland until the Prisons (Ireland) Act of 1826, the ideas surrounding prison reform and new forms of institutional architecture were evidenced in new institutions built in Dublin during the 1810s, such as the Richmond General Penitentiary, which abutted the House of Industry to the north. The close ties between the House of Industry institutions and the government are evidenced by the high instances of naval and military service offered to criminals in the Richmond Penitentiary as a means of serving their sentence. In July 1812, for instance, two individuals confined in the penitentiary were permitted to enter into His Majesty's Navy.Footnote ²¹ This practice was reasonably common, and had the dual effect of contributing to the war effort against France (then ongoing), by conveniently offloading able-bodied men from the service. The close involvement of the Union government in the running and financing of the House of Industry is also reflected in the names of the institutions: the dukes of Bedford, Hardwicke and Whitworth were all lords lieutenant of Ireland between 1801 and 1817, and their names remained in the institutions built during their office. The most enduring lord lieutenant's legacy in the Grangegorman area was the duke of Richmond, whose six years of tenure in the lord lieutenant's residence in Dublin's Phoenix Park, and monetary contributions to the House of Industry, was commemorated in the names of the two institutions in the area that endured until the 1990s: the Richmond Lunatic Asylum and the Richmond Surgical Hospital. In 1813, the year that Richmond passed his office to Whitworth, the Union government was contributing over £52,000 to the upkeep of the House of Industry.Footnote ²²

On its construction, the Richmond Lunatic Asylum was both a contribution to and a departure from the institutional locale. The asylum was the first dedicated institution for housing the pauper insane to be purpose-built in Ireland. Built to relieve increasing pressure on the House of Industry, the asylum's construction was funded by a government grant.Footnote ²³ Before the asylum was opened in 1815, governance of the institution was transferred to a new, dedicated Board of Governors, who were answerable to the lord lieutenant.Footnote ²⁴ Though they shared doctors, patients and governors, the asylum and the House of Industry were separate institutions. Where the House of Industry was reasonably well staffed, and attracted a large number of inmates and patients in its dedicated hospitals, the construction of the asylum and the penitentiary to the north in a 20-year period between 1800 and 1820 marked a change from a single institution to a group of different establishments, each with their own staffing and housing needs.

The asylum was designed by Francis Johnston, a public works architect more famous for his work on the General Post Office and Parliament House on College Green in Dublin. As the public works architect, Johnston had also planned the Bedford Asylum, and planned extensions to the Hardwicke Fever Hospital in the 1810s.Footnote ²⁵ As such, he was familiar with the area, and had some experience in asylum design; Johnston had assisted in the extension of St Patrick's Hospital,Footnote ²⁶ south of the River Liffey. The new Richmond Asylum was, in many ways, a clear departure from his previous institutions. Notably, it was a complete, purpose-built public asylum. Though he would go on to plan provincial asylums around Ireland alongside his nephew William Murray, Johnston's plan for the Richmond Asylum was his first for a dedicated and whole institution of this kind. The asylum was designed in a courtyard plan, with four ranges arrayed in a square and separated at ground-floor level by a cruciform corridor system, which delineated the interior yards. The courtyard plan was a popular institutional design in the eighteenth century and had been applied at St Bartholemews and Guy's Hospital in London. Indeed, the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, across the river from the Richmond and on which Johnston also worked, was arranged around a central courtyard. As such, Johnston had a number of models from which to work, and a number of other architects on whose work he could draw, such as William Blackburn, the surveyor of Guy's Hospital, who applied the courtyard plan in several of his designs.Footnote ²⁷ Johnston's adaptation of institutional courtyard and block plans popularized by prison reform architects like Blackburn is evident in his design for the Richmond Asylum, and the Richmond General Penitentiary in 1820. The courtyard plan was a design which spoke to the insularity and intended introspection of the institutional design. Johnston's design for the Richmond was his only square-plan asylum; his other asylums were designed as radial-plan asylums, consisting of a primary central administration building off which corridors of patient bedrooms projected outwards, to form an X-shape or to the rear and laterally to form a K-shape. In his early designs (many of which were later executed by Murray), his buildings were enclosed to form central courtyards. This element, initially executed at the Richmond, spread around the country to provincial asylums in Belfast, Limerick and Carlow, to name a few. Despite their increasing ubiquity in the Irish provinces in the 1820s and 1830s, Johnston's designs were soon considered outdated. The enclosed courtyard was seen as constricting and unconducive to the movement of air around the building, ideal conditions in other words for the trapping of miasmas.Footnote ²⁸ As more and more asylums were built over the course of the nineteenth century, more innovative designs were brought to bear in light of thinking on sanitation and moral treatment. Enclosed hospital and prison buildings were deemed unsanitary due to concerns over fever and lack of fresh air, and these institutions began to change form, becoming more linear and less enclosed.Footnote ²⁹

The response to criticism regarding the unsanitary nature of the original buildings, as well as rapid overcrowding of the original accommodation over the course of the early nineteenth century, led to all of the original Richmond Asylum buildings of the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s undergoing significant material changes and expansions soon after their construction. In the case of Richmond, this material change took the form of a new asylum building, constructed in a linear plan, sprawling across a more open site immediately to the west of the original asylum building. This new building and its green-field siting meant that, spatially at least, the asylum came to dominate the Grangegorman area, and where there had previously been a rural hinterland, gradually villas and terraced housing were constructed, many to support the asylum. The asylum acted as a catalyst in bringing industry and people to the underdeveloped area, which was also populated by industrial workers, artisans and service workers, as well as support staff for the growing asylum and workhouse.

From the Richmond Asylum to Grangegorman Mental Hospital

Though operating as a separate institution from its opening in 1815, the proximity of the Richmond Lunatic Asylum to the other buildings meant a certain degree of crossover in building plans, frequent sharing of staff and exchange of patients, and spatial solidarity with the other institutions resulting from urban sprawl outwards from Dublin city centre, and around the Grangegorman area. Expansion of all three services – the asylum, the prison and the workhouse – became impossible; the asylum eventually emerged as the dominant institution, and by the mid-twentieth century the health service had spread into most of the buildings between Upper Grangegorman Avenue to the west, and Upper Church Street to the east. As it spread geographically, the asylum demanded more support staff and services, the impact of which is most clearly visible in the names of villas that surround the asylum. The contribution of the asylum to the way the city of Dublin developed is evidenced in the growth of residential areas nearby, and the plotting of access to the city around an area which had previously been agricultural land. The material result of the geographical barrier of the institutions was the expansion of what had formerly been the medieval city suburb of Oxmanstown to the west of Grangegorman. This increasingly residential area was outside of the city proper, and separated from the centre by the institutions.

Expansion and additions to the asylum were a constant feature of the early minute books for the Richmond Asylum, as the inadequacies of the new building became apparent. The architect Johnston drafted a number of plans of the area, noting additions and changes to the institutional locale as a whole. As is clear from plans for an unbuilt extension to the asylum, Johnston envisaged the interconnection of different institutions in the area from the outset. An unexecuted plan from 1815 illustrates extra accommodation for convalescent patients away from the main asylum building. The plan was an early draft of the ‘Whitworth Buildings’, and though it would not connect internally with the asylum, the buildings would physically connect at the asylum's south-west corner.Footnote ³⁰ This extension would have changed the access points to the asylum, creating a new pedestrian entrance around the Whitworth buildings, and cutting the North Fitzwilliam Gate entrance off from the asylum-adjacent avenue and Morningstar Avenue entrance. It is clear from Johnston's plans that from the outset, the Richmond Asylum and House of Industry locale was intended as an interconnected campus, which would have been feasible on land that was managed exclusively by the government. The enclosure of smaller spaces for private businesses and housing along Grangegorman Avenue (the Lane) and Brunswick Street by the mid-nineteenth century made this plan redundant in the long term, however. The construction of a tunnel between the Richmond Asylum and an open site with a pathway, part of the asylum grounds which would eventually become the site of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century, evidences a further attempt made to connect the disparate buildings of the asylum and hospitals into one complex.Footnote ³¹

Access and egress from the asylum was a carefully controlled process, overseen by dedicated individuals, porters and gatekeepers. These individuals occupied separate spaces and the provision of a private residence for the gatekeeper, albeit a small one, in the 1850s marked the gatekeeper out as a singular resident of the asylum, living in detached quarters with a degree of privacy. Prior to the construction of a dedicated gate lodge for the gatekeeper at the Richmond Asylum in the 1850s, access and egress for the asylum was catered for by a gate between the asylum and the House of Industry, and another lodge at the bottom of Morning Star Avenue, where the avenue met Brunswick Street. The First Edition Ordinance Survey maps of the area indicate a gate and a lodge at this location by 1837. Furthermore, the 1837 Ordnance Survey maps do not label Morning Star Avenue. It is probable therefore that Morning Star Avenue was originally a private avenue for the use of the asylum, House of Industry and hospitals. The location of the institutions beyond the Brunswick Street gate, with a central access point for the whole complex, means that the geographical locale was administered in co-operation, rather than as a series of separate entities. As the asylum expanded throughout the nineteenth century, a dedicated gate lodge was constructed at the eastern gate, as mentioned above. An individual gate lodge between the two institutions indicated a separation of the asylum away from the House of Industry, giving the asylum staff leave to control their own access and egress. The asylum was materially and spatially marked as distinctive from the House of Industry for the first time.

Overcrowding and expansion of the locale

The Richmond Asylum slowly expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Consistent overcrowding in the growing institution meant that surrounding buildings were annexed for the asylum. By the 1890s, the asylum occupied the original asylum building (then the Female House), the General Penitentiary and the new linear-plan building (mentioned above) to the west of Grangegorman Avenue. On the Second Edition Ordnance Survey map of the area, the connections between the different elements of the asylum are clearly illustrated. The original asylum was connected to the penitentiary building by a long corridor. The new building and the original asylum complex were separated by Grangegorman Lane, but these buildings were connected via a tunnel, ensuring that goods and people could move between the two areas without leaving the institution. By creating a spatial link between the two buildings, the continued operation of the asylum as a single entity despite the separate sites could be maintained. Furthermore, the tunnel ensured that movement between the two sites could be ensured without exposing the patients to unwelcome attention, or infringing on the increasingly busy Grangegorman Lane, which had become a local residential area. This residential area, which had not existed before the construction of the 1815 asylum building, was part of the sprawl of Dublin's city centre.

The Richmond Asylum was both a living space and a workplace for the staff inside. Staff – specifically, keepers or attendants, and nurses – were considered, in the 1860s, alongside patients as ‘inmates’ of the institution.Footnote ³² In addition to living in the asylum, dedicated residential housing built up around the institution towards the end of the nineteenth century, beyond the bounds of the asylum proper. Far from being an isolated site, closed to any interactions with the surrounding area, the institution was closely tied to its locale. The popular view of the asylum as a closed, ‘total’ institution of social ‘confinement’Footnote ³³ does not hold true in urban institutions in particular, where expansion was contingent on where space was available. As such, this idea of the asylum as an isolated and inaccessible space needs revision. Where enclosure of the sites could be maintained, the privacy of the patients – in accordance with the principles of moral management – was the primary aim.Footnote ³⁴ Within the asylum, communities of staff were bound together by proximity. There is little evidence in the historical record for the complex social lives of the individuals who worked within, especially prior to 1845 (when the system expanded and regular inspections by commissioners generated reports on staff). Where staff were mentioned in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was commonly in relation to a misdemeanour.

The most common references to staff in the workhouse (before the asylum was opened) were in reference to beadles in the eighteenth century. Beadles were a kind of bailiff who worked for the House of Industry; and could be male or female. Their job was to round up ‘sturdy’ beggars and vagrants from the street in the evening and bring them back to the House. Beadles frequently employed violence in the discharge of their duties. The head beadle appointed in 1819 was an ex-sergeant in the army, and his discipline was considered a bonus in his appointment. This is likely due to the fact that when beadles were mentioned in the historical record, it was in relation to their lack of discipline and occasional drunken behaviour. It was not just beadles who were wont to intemperance, though: in September 1815, five nurses and one carter of the House of Industry were fined a week's wages for drunkenness.Footnote ³⁵ As they were all mentioned in the same grouping, it may be assumed that excessive consumption of alcohol was a common feature of staff life on all levels, and suggests a degree of sociality and camaraderie amongst the staff. When two laundresses in the asylum received a pay rise in April 1859, this was granted on condition of the cessation of an un-named practice that was ongoing between the male keepers and the laundresses, which was supplementing their income.Footnote ³⁶ There is nothing to suggest that the arrangement between the laundresses and the keepers was licentious. Rather, it is likely that the laundresses were simply doing laundry for the single male keepers. It was common practice in the nineteenth century for female workers – cleaners, charwomen, even laundry workers – to take on extra work from unmarried men or neighbours outside of their regular work.Footnote ³⁷ The ‘practice’, whatever its nature, was economic, and supports the assertion that staff within the Grangegorman institutions operated their own internal economy and social community. This was facilitated by the architecture of the buildings and the physical proximity of all elements of the asylum, both occupational and residential.

The spread of the asylum into pre-existing buildings separates it from other lunatic asylums in Ireland. The nine provincial asylums constructed in the immediate aftermath of the 1817 Irish Lunatic Asylums for the Poor Act were self-contained and constructed on dedicated sites outside of their respective urban centres. The Grangegorman annexe that began in the mid-nineteenth century with the construction of new wards and two churches on the western side of Grangegorman Avenue was an attempt by the Richmond Asylum to create a dedicated asylum campus within the city. The annexe quickly expanded to include a female epileptic ward, infirmaries and a dedicated Male House, which was built in a block-plan, but in the more fashionable corridor style of asylums constructed in the late nineteenth century. The site on the western side of Grangegorman Avenue did not expand very far into the sprawling grounds initially, as there was only a single entrance to the site. Lord Monck had purchased the land abutting the site to the north, which faced on to the city's North Circular Road, and objected to an asylum entrance on his land, dashing any hopes of an access point from the north.Footnote ³⁸ A diagonal field boundary lined with trees indicates the limits of the expanded asylum grounds in the 1910s, with a single footpath crossing the boundary to the rear of a residential property, St Dymphna's. As the home of the asylum medical superintendent John O'Conor Donelan, St Dymphna's is the only residence on the northern boundary of the asylum, and the only residence facing onto the North Circular Road within a 500 metre area around the asylum to house an asylum employee in 1911. Where, therefore, were asylum employees residing?

Housing for institutional staff

The 1901 and 1911 census of Ireland records that staff were attracted to the Richmond Asylum from across Ireland,Footnote ³⁹ likely in pursuit of higher wages than could be earned at regional asylums. Irish historian of medicine Mark Finnane has suggested that a high turnover of staff in Irish asylums in general at the end of the nineteenth century (over 10 per cent) was due to working conditions and low wages, but that the Richmond was more liberal than other asylums, especially in Leinster.Footnote ⁴⁰ This certainly accounts for the high number of staff originating from counties with asylums of their own: 16 of the 26 counties represented on the 1901 census, for example, including Westmeath and Queen's County in Leinster, Monaghan in Ulster and Clare in Munster. That the asylum was a particular draw for employment from rural Ireland is supported by a comparison with the rural population elsewhere in Dublin and reflects a wider trend of rural representation in civil services and government-run institutions. Connor et al. note in their spatial study of Dublin city demographics as recorded in 1911 that a large proportion of Dublin's police and military personnel were drawn from outside Dublin; similarly to the asylum population, a large proportion of the police, some 40 per cent, were drawn from across Leinster, despite representing only 23 per cent of the population.Footnote ⁴¹ In contrast to industrializing cities like Belfast, Dublin's migrant population grew slowly, increasing into the twentieth century,Footnote ⁴² and the public service – including institutions – provided employment where industry could not.

The recruitment of non-local staff, largely attendants and nurses with whom patients would have the most contact, may also have been a deliberate means of preserving the anonymity of patients and the confidentiality of treatment. Of the 181 attendants and nurses who listed their county of origin on the 1901 census return for the Richmond District Asylum, only 31 were from Dublin. The rest were drawn from across Ireland, the largest numbers coming from Westmeath and Monaghan. Both of these counties had asylums of their own, and the local precedent for employment in an asylum may have brought some of these people to Dublin to work in the asylum, specifically. The attraction of the asylum as an employer to potential migrants explains the large number of employees from counties that were not close to Dublin; this is notable, as the largest number of migrants recorded in the 1881 census of Dublin were drawn from the counties immediately surrounding Co. Dublin.Footnote ⁴³ The early twentieth-century censuses reveal that some of the asylum workers were siblings or close family, indicating that migration to the urban centre was facilitated by family connections. Migration and movement according to social networks and family ties is a common theme in studies of Irish emigration overseas; for example, Deborah Rotman observes the importance of community and networks in her study of Irish immigrant experiences in early twentieth-century Indiana.Footnote ⁴⁴ As such, that these kinds of familial networks were essential in facilitating urban migration within Ireland is unsurprising.

In order to house this industrial-level workforce, the asylum constructed villas and houses around the hospital. Many of the younger (unmarried) members of staff were housed in the asylum itself. A dedicated nurses’ home was constructed on the eastern side of Grangegorman Avenue in the 1930s to support this practice and an expanding workforce considering the growth of the institutions on the Grangegorman site. Staff accommodated in the Richmond Asylum in 1901 had an average age of 26. Similar to industrial colonies of the period, asylums constructed dedicated housing for their staff, likely a necessary measure due to the proportion of staff coming to work at the asylum from elsewhere. This practice is reflected in Grangegorman in the construction of a row of terraced cottages to the south-west of the original Richmond building. The 1911 census records that 20 asylum attendants were resident at Grangegorman Villas, a line of terraces on the east side of Grangegorman Avenue. In 1930, 20 additional cottages for married attendants were constructed on Grangegorman Avenue; it is not clear if these replaced the Grangegorman Villas.Footnote ⁴⁵ Regardless, the asylum took a clear interest in providing convenient accommodation for externally resident staff within the rapidly growing city.

Alongside the workhouse, the asylum also fed tenants into the new artisan housing schemes which were being constructed by the mid-nineteenth century to the north, south and west of Grangegorman. Given the large number of staff required for the running of the institutions, staff spread into the surrounding streets of terraced houses which appeared in this part of Dublin from the end of the nineteenth century. To the south and east, low-value housing and tenements were predominant throughout the nineteenth century; indeed, the institutions themselves created a hard geographical limit to the poor and crowded tenements of the north side of the river, separating them from the more affluent middle-class suburbs beyond the city's North Circular Road.Footnote ⁴⁶ This changed in the 1900s with the rapid construction of hundreds of red-brick terraces to the west of the institutional neighbourhood. The terraced housing of Grangegorman and Stoneybatter was built in response to a series of housing crises associated with living conditions in Dublin's inner city, specifically in the aforementioned tenements. Concern with tenements and public health was a long-term problem; legislation on housing in inner-city Dublin was concerned with the material conditions of the working class since the 1860s.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 reflected a drive towards legislative frameworks to support a reform in working-class housing; the act accounted for the responsibilities of local authorities in providing safe, sanitary housing. This was part of a wider legislative drive to provide adequate housing across Ireland for labourers from the 1880s, albeit primarily in rural Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁸ The first subsidy for urban housing was only provided in 1908 and was inadequate to the needs of the city.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even so, a series of housing schemes was commenced in the city during the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of new housing en masse was a mitigating strategy against the increasing subdivision of Georgian townhouses into one- and two-room tenements. Multiple-occupancy terraces lined the streets south of Grangegorman, around Smithfield and Church Avenue, and census records indicate that houses were divided into up to 10 individual tenements, some housing whole families. While general labourers, factory workers and other unskilled workers lived in these overcrowded houses, (increasingly) professional-class workers like asylum attendants sought living quarters elsewhere.

The small terraces constructed for skilled labourers and artisans immediately to the west of the asylum were just within the financial reach of asylum workers by virtue of the stable nature of their employment.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Dublin Artizan's Dwelling Company's model was the construction of houses, offices and shops on land acquired around the city of Dublin, for the purpose of housing artisans and others. The houses were then leased to tenants, sometimes from large companies in the city such as Guinness; indeed, Arthur and Edward Cecil Guinness were early shareholders in the company.Footnote ⁵¹ The early twentieth-century houses themselves were a mixture of two-storey and single-storey terraces. The properties had a small yard with an outbuilding to the rear and backed onto the wall of the house behind, with no space or alley in between. The houses were constructed of brick, with red or red-washed cills and lintels on the façade. The area was markedly occupied by members of the working and professional classes, of which asylum workers were one group. The terraced housing of Stoneybatter consisted of two of the different schemes of works by the Dublin Artizan's Dwelling Company – the Mount Street Scheme, and the largest scheme the company embarked upon, the Manor Place scheme.Footnote ⁵² The Mount Street scheme was eventually named for the original owner of the land, Mrs Elizabeth Kirwan.Footnote ⁵³ By 1900, the Kirwan Street Cottages abutted the southern boundary of the Grangegorman Mental Hospital, and four pensioners of the asylum are recorded as living there in 1911. By contrast, five employees of the workhouse were living in Kirwan Street Cottages in 1911: an attendant, a clerk and three wardmasters. The Kirwan Street cottages consisted of two-, three- and four-roomed cottages. The cottages were single-storeyed. These cottages were older than the houses constructed in the Manor Place scheme, and the company remarked on their construction that the concrete and brickwork was of poor quality.Footnote ⁵⁴ The older, poorer-quality Kirwan Street Cottages may have cost less to rent than the two-storey terraces constructed in the early twentieth century, in the Manor Place scheme to the west; in lieu of rent books from the scheme which unfortunately no longer survive, this is not certain. The naming scheme for streets in the area was derived from the area's history; Stoneybatter (from the Irish bóthar-na-gloch, meaning road of stones) was an old thoroughfare, running through the townland of Oxmantown, a settlement of Danish Vikings in the medieval period.Footnote ⁵⁵ As such, the streets of Victorian terraces and artisan dwellings constructed between Stoneybatter and Arbour Hill in the nineteenth century were named after Viking kings or associations with Viking or medieval Ireland (Thor Place, Ard-Righ Road, Sigurd Road, etc.).

The distribution of staff from various institutions in the Grangegorman area indicates that people were settling around their workplaces and comprising a not-insignificant portion of the population of the Manor Place Scheme, the Kirwan Street Cottages and the housing around the North Circular Road, as illustrated in Figure 1. The Manor Place scheme consisted of three distinctive building programmes to the west of Aughrim Street (and the Grangegorman asylum), and north of the Royal Barracks. Compared with the Kirwan Street Cottages, of which there were just 63 houses and cottages constructed, 1,005 houses and 2 shops were planned in the three phases of the Manor Place scheme, between 1901 and 1909.Footnote ⁵⁶ The company was selective about the tenants they accepted, and only workers in secure employment could afford the rents on their property.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is not surprising, therefore, that the list of tenants residing in the Manor Place scheme houses in 1911 indicates a particular bent towards employees and former employees of government institutions and the civil service amongst the residents. Indeed, many of the company's caretakers (rent collectors) were drawn from tenants who had retired from the Royal Irish Constabulary.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1911, 12 asylum attendants were living in the terraced housing of the Manor Place scheme, as opposed to just 1 workhouse employee (Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of asylum and workhouse employees in the streets around the Grangegorman Asylum in 1911). Even accounting for fewer live-out employees in the workhouse, asylum workers were thus likely spending more than workhouse employees on rent, reflecting higher pay and relative security in employment. Furthermore, renting from the private Artizan's Dwelling Company, as opposed to Dublin Corporation or the private landlords of Dublin's increasingly decaying tenements, evidences aspirational attitudes amongst these asylum employees towards their living arrangements. Renting from the Artizan's Dwelling Company put asylum workers in the same economic bracket as members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Royal Irish Constabulary and General Post Office workers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Asylum nurses and attendants were therefore actively assimilating themselves into Dublin's growing lower middle class. Unlike many of the frequently inebriated and troublesome House of Industry employees of a century before, the growing numbers of nurses and attendants in north-west Dublin aspired to a level of social respectability.

Figure 1.

Map of Grangegorman area of Dublin based on Second Edition Ordnance Survey, showing distribution of employee residences. Drawn by author.

The geographic proximity of the Artizan's Dwelling Company housing schemes and other housing in the vicinity of Grangegorman also influenced where asylum, workhouse and hospital employees lived. A survey of the 1911 census for a 500 metre radius around both Richmond Asylum sites – the male and female divisions – indicated that 40 asylum workers were living outside of the asylum on the night of the 1911 census. Of these, 20 were living in Grangegorman Villas, the purpose-built accommodation for married attendants between the two asylum sites on Grangegorman Road. Apart from the above-mentioned asylum and workhouse employees in the Kirwan Street Cottages, the rest of the asylum workers within a 500 metre radius of the institution were living in Blackhall Place, and Bow Street, as well as in the above-mentioned terraces in the Manor Street housing scheme. Only two are recorded as living in tenements, one in Church Street and another on Grangegorman Lower. Given the close proximity of these streets to the asylum site, the asylum either influenced their choice of occupation, or their address. Beyond asylum workers specifically, 21 individuals within a 500 metre radius (including 11 residing in the Richmond Hospital on the night of the census) listed their occupation as medical students. Some of these were the sons or daughters of physicians. The concentration of hospitals in the area facilitated students’ medical training, and may even have influenced their decision to pursue a career in medicine. Certainly, one student, resident on Rathdown Terrace, was following a family tradition; his father was a doctor, while his sister was a physician and surgeon. Workers in the cattle market, Smithfield vegetable markets and Broadstone Railway Terminus make up the bulk of other workers in the immediate area surrounding the asylum, further evidencing the choice of workers to live close to their place of employment.

As well as the spatial impact of institutional buildings, as discussed above, housing provision for the support workers required significant development and construction on the peripheries of these institutional locales. The presence of asylum workers and their active occupation of urban space around their large employers had as much of an impact on the modern city as the institutions themselves. In turn, the lunatic asylum and workhouse significantly influenced the material development of their surrounding streetscapes, beyond the buildings themselves, into residential streets. The 1911 census is limited to those who submitted completed forms, and those who were resident at home or in work on the night, but the results of this census study indicate that the asylum and workhouse were major employers in the immediate local area, as much as the railways, markets and local industries.