Simms, Herbert George (1898–1948), architect, was born on 30 November 1898 in London, the eldest of at least six children (five sons and one daughter) of George William Simms, train driver and former shepherd, of Fawley, Buckinghamshire, and his wife Nellie (née Worster) of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. George Simms also had four older children (two sons and two daughters) from a previous marriage; his first wife, Mahala, died in 1896 aged 39. Young Herbert had an ordinary working-class upbringing, living in the family home on Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town, with his elder half-siblings, and attending the nearby Haverstock Industrial and Commercial School. By 1911 the family had moved to 33 Victoria Road, at which point Herbert was the eldest of the six children remaining in the house. During the first world war he served in the Royal Field Artillery, and in 1919 received an ex-service scholarship to study architecture at the University of Liverpool, where he was awarded a certificate in civic design in March 1923.
Coming to Dublin in 1924, Simms began working as an assistant architect in the firm of Aubrey Vincent O'Rourke, brother of then Dublin city architect, Horace Tennyson O'Rourke (qv). Dublin was a city in the midst of long-term socioeconomic problems inherited from previous British administrations. Issues such as public health and housing had never adequately been addressed, and the significant rise in living standards for much of the population was certainly not reflected in the city's worst tenement slums. In 1925 Simms was appointed temporary architect to Dublin Corporation and continued in this role until 1929, at which point he was made permanent. (He had received a diploma in town planning in 1928.) He then made the odd decision to resign his post and travel to India, where he became a town planner in the Punjab region. This was a short-lived venture, and within six months he was back in Dublin. He married (30 September 1929) in the Roman catholic church of St John the Baptist, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Eileen Florence Clarke (1908–78), daughter of Thomas Clarke, a former DMP constable and garda. In 1930 he regained his position with the corporation at a salary of 8 guineas per week. This six-year period, from 1924 to 1930, including official visits to London, Liverpool and Manchester to observe the latest innovations in the construction of blocks of flat dwellings, served as a useful apprenticeship, and would influence Simms's future work in Dublin.
The coming to power of Fianna Fáil in 1932 gave new urgency to resolving Dublin's notorious slum question. Previously, the design and construction of municipal housing in Dublin had been the responsibility of the city architect's office. Under the provisions of the 1932 housing act, which reflected promises by Éamon de Valera (qv) to increase public spending on housing, Dublin Corporation established a distinct housing architect's department separate from the city architect's office. Herbert Simms was given the task of running the new department, located at 1–3 Parliament Street. Together with a team of two assistant architects, three draughtsmen, two temporary architects, and a number of quantity surveyors and clerical assistants, he oversaw the construction of 17,000 new homes for Dublin's working classes over a period of sixteen years, until his untimely death in 1948.
While Simms is mostly remembered in architectural circles for his stylish blocks of three- and four-storey flats located throughout Dublin's inner city, he was also responsible for thousands of two-storey houses in green field sites on the outer fringes of the city. Under his supervision, a system known as 'decanting' was employed: prior to the demolition of areas marked for slum clearance, blocks of four-storey flats were built on derelict sites within the urban core in preparation for relocating dispossessed tenants; once demolition took place, further blocks were then built on the newly available sites. In terms of composition and expression, these flat complexes are instantly recognisable as the work of Herbert Simms. Such stylistic traits as brickwork, four-storey elevation, strong emphasis on long horizontal lines, and perimeter site facade shaping the surrounding streetscape have drawn comparisons with earlier Dutch models espoused by Michael de Klerk on Amstelkade and Rijnstraat in Amsterdam, and J. J. P. Oud and Johannes van Hardeveld in Rotterdam. However, unlike the Dutch blocks with their wonderful flourishes of expressionism, Simms's buildings, though attractive, are somewhat less inventive. They also differ in practical terms, the Dutch models providing access via the street front and internal stairways, while access to the Dublin blocks was always to the rear via external stair-towers and open galleries. This is similar to English models such as the Peabody Trust in London, and it is likely that Simms sought inspiration from both Dutch and British schools, the result being a unique architectural language that has become synonymous with early twentieth-century inner-city Dublin. Examples that stand out are Countess Markievicz House, Townsend Street (168 units) and Oliver Bond House, Usher Street/Bridgefoot Street (1936; 388 units), on the south side of the river Liffey, and Chancery House, Chancery Street, on the north side. The former two display expressionist features, including soft curving angles and yellow brick with red brick dressings, while Chancery House, an essay in classic art deco, is a smaller complex of only twenty-seven flats with attached decorative garden, considered by many as a masterpiece in urban, multi-storey social housing. It comprises a mixture of red brick and render with wide soft curves, flat roof and large oversailing eaves, saluting Oud's work in Rotterdam, but with less exuberance. Simms's achievements were recognised by his election as associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (1923) and of the Town Planning Institute (1928), and member of the Town Planning Institute (1932) and of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (1939).
Although Simms favoured inner-city block housing over suburban schemes as an approach to large-scale slum clearance, it was the latter that proved more productive in terms of volume. Consequently, suburbs such as Crumlin, Cabra and Ballyfermot were transformed in the 1930s and 1940s into large, low-density housing schemes. From 1932 to 1939 the corporation built an average of 1,112 units per year, completing an astonishing 2,235 in the final year of that span. All of these had been designed by Simms. Adding to the burden already being placed upon his shoulders, the government embarked upon an ambitious new housing initiative in the 1940s, which envisaged 30,000 new homes in the greater Dublin area over a ten-year period at a rate of 3,000 units per year. Since only 5,000 of these new homes were to be flats, Simms felt grave concern, as he had always supported the regeneration of urban fabric in preference to suburban sprawl. Also disturbing to Simms was the fact that 1,000 of these new dwellings were to be of prefabricated design, which he vehemently opposed. Throughout the 1940s he worked tirelessly to keep up with the incessant demands that the corporation placed upon him, exacerbated after 1945 when Horace O'Rourke, the city architect, retired without being replaced.
By the end of the 1940s life was becoming unmanageable for Simms, who had suffered a nervous breakdown fifteen years previously. On 27 September 1948, deeply depressed and exhausted from the stresses of work, he drank half a bottle of whiskey in his car near the Coal Quay Bridge in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, before throwing himself in front of an oncoming train. He lay undiscovered for a number of hours before being eventually taken to the nearby St Michael's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. At the inquest it was revealed that he had been worried about work issues and was particularly upset about the proposals for prefabricated houses. The coroner returned a verdict of 'shock following laceration of the brain and amputation of the arm, due to being struck by a train while of unbalanced mind'. Aged 49 at his death, Simms was survived by his wife Eileen. In a tribute to his life, the city surveyor, Ernest Taylor, declared: 'It is not given to many of us to achieve so much in the space of a short lifetime for the benefit of our fellow men' (Irish Builder, 16 October 1948, 836). Simms was buried in Dean's Grange cemetery.
A suicide note left in Simms's car is revealing: 'I cannot stand it any longer. My brain is too tired to work anymore. It has not had a rest for twenty years except when I am in a heavy sleep. It is always on the go like a dynamo and still the work is being piled on me. I leave everything I possess to Eileen, my wife. What is mine is hers. I am sorry for the bother this will cause but I think I am going slowly mad. I have not designed the first floor fireplace yet. You see, I have already gone barmy in the top storey myself' (Ir. Times, 1 October 1948).