Building the Future: New Towns

The Irish Government established the Shannon Free Airport Development Company (SFADCO) in 1959 to promote the development of air transport activity at Shannon, Co. Clare. The aims of SFADCO were to maintain and increase passenger and freight traffic, and to create additional employment through the establishment of industrial enterprises.

Critical to the success of SFADCO efforts would be Shannon Town, the first new town to be developed in Ireland in almost two centuries. Downes Meehan & Robson were the architects, in association with architect and planner Frederick Rogerson. Intended to eventually accommodate 6,000 people, housing and community services were to be developed on a balanced and phased basis to attract the workers without whom the anticipated commercial and industrial growth could not be achieved. A guiding principle was that the development should be relatively high density, in contrast with its rural surroundings, enabling people to live within easy walking distance of shops, entertainment and work.

A number of schemes in the heroic idiom of the 1960s were put forward for the heart of the new town. These are encapsulated in this perspective drawing of the proposed central plaza. Looking from a lower-level pedestrian area to an upper concourse, also fully pedestrianised, the view is framed by a ten-storey hotel on the right and a three or four storey apartment building on the left. In the distance is an office block, a variation of one of several schemes Rogerson prepared for a headquarters building for SFADCO.

Construction of houses and apartment blocks began in 1960 at Drumgeely Hill, east of the airport, and by 1965 some 137 apartments and 316 houses had been provided, along with schools and a catholic church. However, the pace of development faltered, and the pedestrian mecca of the town centre never quite materialised.

Attenuated Utopias

Erika Hanna

 In the 1960s the New Towns movement came to Ireland, as a demand for new housing was met by the excitement and inspiration of a new generation of internationally trained architects. Its intellectual roots were a stiff cocktail of Ebeneezer Howard’s gardens, Scandinavian system building, Corbusian confidence, Milton Keynes’s roundabouts, mixed with an Irish genealogy drawn from plantation towns and estate villages. These influences would be united in designs for complete new urban spaces combining accommodation, industry, shopping, and amenities in one unified design. But these new constructions were intended to be more than just buildings; ambitious architects believed that these new concrete forms would create a new society of the future on Ireland’s green fields. High flats would enable access to light and air for all citizens; town plazas would provide leisure and shopping; linear and multi-nucleated developments would allow all residents access to green space; while wide straight roads would give every citizen the opportunity to own a car. These new spatial forms would create modern, egalitarian, and prosperous settlements where all would have work and time for leisure.

The new projects were launched by photo-shoots of men with Brylcreemed hair and mohair suits, radiating a sense assurance as they scrutinized their architectural models. In 1960, the architectural firm Downes Meehan & Robson alongside Frederick Rogerson were appointed to plan Shannon New Town, to provide housing for the workers at Shannon Airport and Industrial Zone, and bring the west of Ireland the benefits of industrialization (fig. 24.1). In 1964, the strip encompassing Lurgan and Portadown, Co. Armagh, was designated as first linear city on the island of Ireland (fig. 24.2), which would provide all residents with easy access to shopping, employment, and green space, and showcase Northern Ireland’s affluence and modernity (fig. 24.3). Geoffrey Copcutt, the renowned architect of Cumbernauld in Scotland, was appointed to oversee the design, and brought revolutionary ideas including gyratory traffic systems, centralised vacuum and sewage cleaning plants, and town heating powered by a civic thermal nuclear station. In response to acute housing shortages, in 1964 the National Building Agency in partnership with the architect Arthur Swift was appointed to construct a new settlement of towers, green space, shopping plazas, and community amenities at Ballymun, four miles north of Dublin, with the aim of providing comfort and opportunity for all the city’s citizens.

But Utopia was attenuated. As the financing of these schemes stalled, the optimism of the early years began to falter. Despite the aspiration for total development which would unite housing, amenities, and industry, financial constraints meant that these ambitions were soon curtailed. Lacking funds, the central state contracted essential services and amenities to the private sector, which was unable or unwilling to build at the scale or quality envisaged by the scheme’s founders. Shannon’s town centre was not constructed until 1972 and did not live up to the glamour of the architects’ plans. In Ballymun, neither the shopping centre nor the prospected light rail connection to the city centre were constructed, leaving residents to face a long bus journey to the city centre to do their shopping. In Craigavon, a curtailment in central funding and the political crisis of the 1970s meant that the envisaged shopping centre, monorail, and other community amenities were never constructed. As the grand plans were scaled back, it gradually became evident that something had got lost despite – or because of – the miracle of scientific planning, something that only crystallised for planning professionals through the construction of these schemes. Without enough shops, pubs, and community spaces, the spontaneity and creative discord that have lured people to the city for millennia seemed to be lacking.

Despite their greenfield locations, these new places could not escape the constraints of class and religion. In Ballymun, the new accommodation did not solve the city’s economic challenges and, as unemployment grew in the 1970s, deprivation brought with it problems of drug use, vandalism, and joyriding. Moreover, the funding necessary to maintain a community of this size did not follow its initial construction. The lifts broke, the common areas were run down, and the materials and forms were blamed for the residents’ economic marginalization. The famous towers of Ballymun were demolished by 2012, replaced by a mixed development of social and private housing. In Craigavon, initial attempts to create a community for both Catholics and Protestants collapsed when the Unionist establishment mobilized in opposition, and Geoffrey Copcutt – disillusioned – resigned. During the tumult of the Troubles, few wanted to take the risk of moving to an unknown community and, of a series of envisaged sectors, only Brownlow was completed, leaving the settlement without the scale and density necessary to function as a city. Many houses, left empty, were demolished during the 1970s.

More than half a century on from these initial constructions, and despite the problems which beset their foundation, two or more generations have made their home in these places and communities have developed. These towns have now become home to diverse populations from all over the world, and a host of grassroots community development initiatives. The trees, planted as saplings in the 1960s have matured, their roots fracturing the concrete, mellowing the townscape.

Dr Erika Hanna is Associate Professor in Modern History, University of Bristol, with research interests in place, visuality and the built environment in Ireland and Britain.