Abstract
The following article examines housing in the village of Portlaw, County Waterford. The village was built around a cotton factory by the Malcomson family, prominent industrialists in the south of Ireland. Today, the site is well known as one of Ireland’s largest model villages. Portlaw was built in the 1820s and 1830s, and redesigned in the 1860s. It has been traditionally assumed, as a result of descriptions of contemporary visitors to the site, that the housing in the early village was of a high standard. Timmins’ reassessment of the housing standards in the Ashworth settlements, published in this journal, has shown that archival and historical analysis of housing standards can sometimes be misleading. Descriptions of housing are not always reliable indicators of the reality of working class standards of living. This article examines archival valuation assessments of the houses in the early village of Portlaw to see if a similar pattern occurred in Ireland.
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