Patrick Comerford
For more than ten years, I have written about the sad and sorry state of No 201 Harold’s Cross Road, an important part of the architectural heritage of the Rathmines and Harold’s Cross area of south Dublin and an integral part of the history of Quakers and the story of Irish philanthropy.
In recent months, however, a number of new comments on these posts, dating back to 2013, alerted me to the restoration work now being carried out on this important building.
So, during my pre-Christmas visit to Dublin earlier last week, as I was strolling around Rathmines and Harold’s Cross, I decided to see the work myself, and I was delighted to see how the house is being rescued and restored.
Countless efforts have been made in recent years to have the complete building classified as a Protected Structure, and to ensure the protection of the railings and plinth wall in front.
Back in March and August 2015, I wrote about the sad neglect and decay of this house, pointing out that this was part of local history was in danger of being lost. Looking at the house from the street then, the surviving 18th century features included the blocked front doorcase. But the windows were boarded up and it looked derelict, the front garden was overgrown, and there was an overpowering sense that the whole site was being neglected.
The only apparent change during that five-month period eight years ago was the addition of garish whitewash that was used to cover up graffiti on the walls. But that had simply defaced the attractive symmetry of the red-brick façade of the house.
No 201 Harold’s Cross Road is a large red-brick building dating from 1750, and it appears on Rocque’s maps of 1756 and 1760. It was there the Quaker abolitionist and philanthropist Richard Allen (1803-1886) was born on 8 January 1803.
The story of the Allen family is told in detail by Clive Allen in his 2007 book The Allens, Family and Friends, ten generations of Quaker ancestry.
When Richard Allen was born in this house in Harold’s Cross, it was the summer home of his parents, Edward and Ellen Allen. Edward Weston Allen (1765-1848) was a linen merchant and wholesale draper. In 1798, he married Eleanor ‘Ellen’ Barrington (1776-1819), descended from an old Quaker family from Co Wexford.
Edward and Ellen Allen lived at 102 Saint James’s Street, and later at 22 Upper Bridge Street. But in the summer months they lived in this house in Harold’s Cross, which was then a rural area.
Edward was a founding member of the Cork Street Fever Hospital, the Dublin Institution, and other charitable foundations. Towards the end of his life, Edward Allen moved to a house named Mountain View near Churchtown, where he died in 1848 at the age of 82. Although he had long stopped attending Quaker meetings and had left the Society of Friends, he was buried in Friends’ Burial Ground in Cork Street, Dublin.
In all, Edward and Ellen Allen had 15 children. Their second son, Richard Allen, was born in the house in Harold’s Cross on 8 January 1803, and like some of his brothers and sisters he was educated there privately by a tutor. At the age of 17, he joined the family business in Bridge Street.
Although his father had been asked to leave the Society of Friends, Richard was an active Quaker, and in 1828 he married into another Quaker merchant dynasty when he married Anne Webb. But they never lived at the house in Harold’s Cross, living instead at Ellis Quay, and later at High Street, Dublin. He also had shops opposite the GPO in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, and in Patrick Street, Cork.
He was active in the movement for the abolition of slavery, took part in many anti-slavery conferences in London and lobbied parliament for more effective legislation outlawing the slave trade. He attended the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the other Irish delegates including Daniel O’Connell and the historian Richard Robert Madden.
His commitment to the anti-slavery movement became a financial risk to his business, and he also became involved in movements for prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty.
His friends and wider circle included the freed slave Frederick Douglass, the American publisher William Lloyd Garrison, the temperance campaigner Father Theobald Mathew, the Dublin-born philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo, and the poet and balladeer Thomas Moore.
He later lived at De Vesci Lodge in Monkstown and then at Brooklawn in Blackrock, Co Dublin, where he died in 1886.
By 1870, the former Allen family home in Harold’s Cross had become a ‘Female Orphanage,’ known as Westbank Orphanage or the Protestant Girls’ Orphanage. A a small central path leading to the front door and an extended north range (now No 199) with a Post Office. The main building was still marked on maps as an orphanage in 1936. By then the north range was rebuilt. The shop I remember from my childhood as Healy’s grocery shop closed in recent years and was derelict by 2013.
Ten years ago, back in 2013, I asked whether we are about to lose another piece of Dublin’s architectural heritage. Nothing was done in the years that followed, and the condition of the house continued to deteriorate.
Harold’s Cross is a Dublin 6 suburb with a lot going for it. It has good cafés, an interesting social mix of housing, from artisan cottages at Harold’s Cross Bridge to the elegant Victorian houses and villas on Leinster Road and Kenilworth Square.
People living in Harold’s Cross may bemoan the loss of the Kenilworth Cinema in recent decades, and the fact there is no major supermarket in the area. But the loss of this house, probably the oldest surviving building in the village, would have done far greater damage to the architectural heritage and character of Harold’s Cross.
Under the Dublin City Development Plan the entire site is now zoned Z1 ‘to protect, provide and improve residential amenities.’ Dublin City Council granted permission in 2019 for the refurbishment and construction of 12 apartments in house, including seven apartments in the house and five apartments in two linked three-storey residential blocks replacing the industrial unit. The plan includes a mix of one- and two-bedroom apartments and a new pedestrian entrance from Leinster Place, off Leinster Road.
The site of 199, 201 & 201A Harold’s Cross Road, covering 0.07 hectares (0.16 acres), including the three-storey house, a two-storey extension and a dilapidated industrial unit or warehouse to the rear, was sold recently through Knight Frank.
Today, the site is closed off from public view and covered in builders’ cladding and scaffolding. But was good to catch a glimpse of the house last week, and to be assured that it is being restored appropriately.
