Sailortown walking tour - European Heritage Open Days 2015

The following are notes and slides developed for a walking tour of the Sailortown area of Belfast, delivered at 10am, 12/09/2015, as part of the European Heritage Open Days in conjunction with PLACE, the Northern Ireland centre for the built environment.

Start - Harbour Commissioners

Slide 1 - This is a tour of Belfast’s lost quarter, commonly referred to as ‘Sailortown,’ a different and difficult sort of tour in that Sailortown has all but disappeared. I have chosen not to discuss Sailortown as an historical artefact, but rather use it as a case study of urban planning throughout the final half of the 20th century. As such, much of what I have to say about Sailortown and it’s unfortunate fate from the late 1960s onwards is based on hearsay, speculation and a small kernel of provable data, most of which is open to debate. As such, I don’t mind anyone contributing their views and opinions on what may have transpired here, down by the docks. Initially we’re just going to walk from this end of Sailortown to the other, through some of the different conditions you find in the area, and then once we’re on the other side we’ll stop and I’ll explain a little bit about what the area used to be like and what happened to it.

Stop 1 - Whitla Street

Slide 2 - Here we are now at the northern-most boundary of Sailortown, Whitla Street. The exact boundaries of the area are blurred at best, but it it commonly agreed that this is definitely where it ends on this side. A poem by Sailortown resident Tommy O’Hara begins by saying “From Whitla Street to God knows where, now there’s an argument right there.” It is generally agreed that Henry Street was the southern boundary and Nelson Street was the western boundary, but people claim to be from Sailortown as far down as Corporation Square where we started, and there is an argument that York Street formed part of Sailortown, although here the age old ‘Irish Problem’ enters into things, with Sailortown largely being regarded as a Catholic area and York Street being Protestant.

Up to the 1960s this area was home to around 5000 people, and was called Sailortown obviously for it’s proximity to the docks. As such it was an extremely cosmopolitain area, with foreign sailors constantly coming and going, and potentially staying in the area for weeks or months at a time. Additionally, many of the locals were sailors themselves, individuals who had travelled the world and been welcomed in foreign ports, experiences which potentially gave them a different attitude to residents of other quarters of the city; an outlooking quarter which physically and socially connected Belfast to the rest of the world.

Notable residents include Rinty Monaghan, the boxer whose statue you can now see down beside the Ulster University on York St; Big Jim Larkin, the Irish trade union leader who lived and worked here in his early days, comedian Frank Carson; and Buck Alec, the policeman, loyalist paramilitary and street fighter lived here, and could be seen walking his pet lion through the streets.

But when recounting a history of a place which is now gone it is easy to get lost in the romantic nostalgia of what it was and could have been. The area was very poor and existed on the outskirts of an incredibly busy industrial port, meaning the air quality would have been pretty poor. The housing, before it was demolished, was referred to as Victorian slum housing in a report at the time, very cramped and lacking amenities - a complaint which was made about all the inner-city housing in Belfast in the pre-war years, including the lower Shankill, Falls road, and inner East Belfast - all areas, coincidentally, which could be said to have been detrimentally affected by redevelopment, something we will talk more about at our next stop.

Stop 2 - Original houses/Car park

Slide 3 - Regardless of where exactly Sailortown was, the contemporary area as I see it can be largely divided into three distinct parts with distinct feelings, which hopefully you detected on our walk here. You have this central area which is the nucleus of Sailortown as it used to be. It is dilapidated and a little bit sorry for itself, but retains a spark of authentic community feeling which is unfortunately being eroded. Then you have Clarendon Dock, which is now a far cry from what it would have been as an operational graving dock, used for repairing and maintaining the boats which serviced the dock. It could now be referred to as a sleek, 21st century commercial estate, whose employees all live outside the area. While it’s not officially part of Sailortown, it’s development is having a massive affect on the area as a whole and is worlds apart in atmosphere, financial investment and attitude to the rest of the area. Finally you have the area between Sailortown and York Street, which is a mess of roads, motorway on slips, carriageways and these derelict residual spaces rendered largely useless by the infrastructure.

So what exactly happened between this map (1920) and this map (2008)? As the second world war was drawing to a close it was accepted that, as I suggested before, Belfast’s inner-city housing was deemed largely inadequate and a report and corresponding masterplan was devised which was unfortunately never enacted. It suggested a series of grand avenues with corresponding squares, and also proposed a road bridge in the location of the current flyover, but it would have been at grade rather than the raised motorway we currently have. While the masterplan was never adopted, the identification of the housing crisis was taken seriously and, along with the construction of suburban housing estates like Cregagh estate, a process of what was referred to as ‘slum clearance’ began towards the end go the ‘50s.

Slide 4 - By the early 60s, you had the rise of Prime Minister Terrence O’Neill, who was exceptionally progressive and liberal compared to his predecessors, and with him you had a considerable amount of progressive liberal civil servants, people like Ronald Green and John Oliver, and they were keen on pushing through all kinds of reforms including a brave new Modernist masterplan for Belfast. They brought in an expert architect-planner from Edinburgh called Robert Matthew and he drafted what is now referred to as the ‘Matthew Plan.’ The plan proposed to limit the outward expansion of Belfast and create these satellite towns where, theoretically, people would live and commute to Belfast to work on newly constructed roads infrastructure. Matthew himself did not go into a great amount of details on the roads, but you can see this ominous dotted line around the centre of the city, implying what was to be proposed in the future.

Slide 5 - By 1967 elements of the Matthew plan were being implemented, including the construction of Craigavon; but the element which had the biggest bearing on Sailortown was, of course, the road plans. Travers Morgan prepared the report for what was known as the Belfast Urban Motorway. Now, the majority of the houses in the York Street area had already been cleared in the interests of 'slum clearance,' the intention being that people would eventually be moved back into the area.

Slide 6 - The motorway plans, however, changed the intention to move people back into the area. The majority of the residents of Sailortown were moved up to Shore Crescent, off the Shore Road, where you can see this monument to Sailortown - testament to the amount of former Sailortown residents who ended up there. The residents were also scattered around the city, to new estates like New Lodge, the Lower the Shankill, Divis and Twinbrook, never to return to Sailortown. We’ll walk further down into Sailortown to discuss what possibly happened and to look at St Joseph’s church which stands as a analogy for the area at large.

Stop 3 - St Joseph’s

This is St Joseph’s Church which, as you can see, now lies derelict. This church is totemic for the fate of Sailortown as a whole, although it’s final demise occurred about 30yrs after Sailortown can be said to have disappeared, even though the identity is maintained by an unfortunately ever dwindling core of individuals. Much of the land that was given up for the good of slum clearance and, later, the motorway was, much like St Joseph's, owned by the Catholic Church. According to residents that I interviewed as part of my PhD the parish priest promised from his pulpit that people would return to the area after the displacement of slum clearance. That, as you have seen, proved not to be the case.

The church’s numbers naturally declined over the course of the 70s and 80s, until the church was proposed to be closed in the late 1990s. The closure was strongly opposed by a strong core of individuals, the majority of whom now comprise the Sailortown Historical Society, which has now become the Sailortown Regeneration Group. The church was taken on by franciscans upon it’s closure until 2001, who eventually withdrew putting the fate of the church in the balance. It was occupied on 2 separate occasions by local protesters, the regeneration group, trying to save the buildings as a place of worship, until they eventually relented and, in return for the 99yr lease of the building, agreed that it would never again be a place of worship. There is currently a plan to make the building into a community centre -  a plan but no funding - so the church, it seems, will remain here untouched until it needs to be pulled down due to safety concerns.

Stop 5 - Clarendon Dock

Here, we can appreciate the unique nature of this part of the city. We have the old graving dock here, with two of the oldest buildings in Belfast, and in the background you have City Quays One, one of the newest ones. This area was the site of Belfast’s first shipyard and the traces of it can still be clearly seen. This building was also, briefly, the HQ of the Laganside corporation which as you probably know, was the first round of post-conflict redevelopment and part of the process of ‘normalisation’ as John Major called it - the process of making good the city’s physical and social fabric in the aftermath of the Troubles, another fascinating subjects far as the redevelopment of the city goes.

City Quays is a proposed 20 acre £250M mixed-use redevelopment of lands bound by the M3 Motorway, River Lagan, Dock Street and Corporation Street by Belfast Harbour Commissioners. In July 2010 the Harbour Commissioners submitted an outline planning application seeking permission for a "mixed use development comprising120 residential units, a hotel, 123,170 sqm of officespace, retail, cafes and restaurants and multi-storey car parking.

Robert Matthew and the Belfast Regional Survey & Plan - Part 1

‘A Trump to Turn the Trick’(1)

Robert Matthew’s 1963 Regional Survey and Plan(2) for Belfast is arguably the most influential planning document in the city’s history, ushering in a new era and transforming it from a run-down Victorian industrial slum-town into a modernist planned regional city. Despite defining the contemporary city, today’s urbanists and planners blame the apparently negative urban conditions of the city centre’s periphery on this plan(3), often drawing similarities between the results of enacting it’s proposals and the violence and destruction of the ‘Troubles.’ The modernist movement in general has been largely discredited, with the general public associating it with high-rise inner city social housing, low-rise suburban estates rife with social and economic problems along with anti-pedestrian motorways disrupting previously happy and idyllic urban quarters(4).

A cursory look at the roots of modernism, and in particular the post-war planning revolution, reveals that it’s rhetoric and, we can only assume, it’s intentions were driven by a deep seated desire to improve the lot of humanity, along with the belief that humanity needed to increase it’s connection with the natural world to do so. As inspired as Robert Matthew was by the late-Victorian planning theorists, the question then remains; how did the desire to move it’s citizenry closer to nature result in a series of plans to construct an apparently ‘anti-humanist’ motorway system through thriving urban neighbourhoods? An examination of Robert Matthew as an architect and planner along with the concepts and theories which inspired him reveal that this response is not as contradictory as it first appears.

Robert Matthew, Beginnings

‘…a driving social idealism…’(5)

Robert Hogg Matthew was born in Edinburgh in 1906 to Annie Hogg and John Matthew. John was an architect and worked in the office of renowned Scottish architect, and proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, Robert Lorimer. Indeed, his father’s work pervaded family life to the degree that Robert and his two brothers would become educated in the profession(6) with Robert particularly becoming increasingly interested in Lorimer’s “social reformist repugnance to mass commercialism.”(7) John Matthew’s relationship with his employer would also have an affect on the young Robert, who frequently observed his father being used by the bullish and opportunistic Lorimer.  His brother Stuart observed that Robert’s personality appears to be a mix of self-importance, almost arrogance, inherited from his mother’s fierce investment and pride in him as an individual, and the “…nervous, neurotic, argumentative energy, and even the self-doubting instability of his father, whose own domination by Lorimer served as constant warning, and spur, to Robert.”(8)

The social reformist themes of the Arts and Crafts movement which would become more prominent in early modernism would inform Robert as he embarked on the architectural course at the Edinburgh College of Art. Here Matthew was taught urban theory by Frank Mears, son-in-law of renowned biologist, sociologist and town-planning pioneer Sir Patrick Geddes.(9) The Geddesian philosophy of ‘Civics’ fused an evangelical belief in Darwinian evolutionary theory with an almost spiritual humanism tempered by the distinctly Victorian ideal of a hierarchical class system in which it was the responsibility of the privileged, both in financial and educational terms, to use their privilege to advance the lot of society as a whole. For Matthew and the early British Modernists this meant that the state should be empowered to intervene in people’s lives ‘for their own good.’ 

As Matthew entered professional practice, a distinctly Geddesian ‘scientific-humanist’ movement with socialist overtones was taking hold of architecture in the period between the wars. Another of Matthew’s planning tutors, E.A.A. Rowse, now at the Architectural Association in London, set about combining the roles of “…Engineer, Surveyor, Architect and Local Government officer together with that of the Economist, Sociologist and the Politician into that of the Planner.”(10) The idea of the professional town planner was slowly being embraced by the mainstream and, in turn, the trend for private architectural practice was waning, being viewed as the individualist, egotistical and self-indulgent quest for celebrity, and was slowly being replaced by agencies established to address the social problems of the contemporary urban environment. In short, the interventionist state the early proponents of Geddesian theory dreamed of was becoming a reality. The government was now viewed as an “obvious architectural patron and, increasingly, employer.”(11)

In 1935 Robert Matthew took on such a job, at the Department of Health for Scotland (DHS) which was “…pursuing a methodical agenda of planned interventionism” with regards to planning and housing in Scotland, and was also driven by a fierce nationalist pride and a desire to not be controlled by London. “For Robert, the move to government architecture also had the benefit of distancing him from the possibility of ever having to work under a ‘big boss’ in private practice, as his father before him with Lorimer.”(12) The Second World War, perhaps rather perversely, was viewed as a boon for the new profession of town planning. There was a lot of rebuilding required which offered the opportunity of addressing the social problems created by the inactivity caused by two international conflicts resulting in inadequate inner-city living conditions as the Victorian terraces across Britain began to show their age. Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, was now the First Minister of Works, essentially in charge of rebuilding now that the end of the war was conceivably in sight. He promoted research-led planning and began implementing Geddesian planning ideals as part of legislation, legitimising them even further, taking them beyond theory and into widely accepted praxis.

By this stage Robert Matthew now held the position of Chief Architect at the DHS and began doing much the same north of the border, taking on a host of researcher architects to exhaustively survey and plan large areas of Scotland. Matthew’s planning was distinctly ‘humanist’ rather than overtly socialist, being scientific and technocratic and also very much believing in state interventionism. His approach was “…somewhat anti-urban…” with "…strong concerns about rural depopulation and the regeneration of smaller towns.”(13)

These were ideals he would later bring to bear on the city and region of Belfast.

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(1)  Glendinning, Miles. 2008. Modern Architect : the Life and Times of Robert Matthew. London: Riba. Page 53

(2) Matthew, Robert Hogg. 1963. Belfast Regional Survey and Plan :recommendations and Conclusions : Presented to Parliament by Command of His Excellency the Governor of Northern Ireland, February 1963. Vol. 451. Cmd. Belfast: H.M.S.O.

(3)  Along with the series of plans which were followed and inspired by it including -

R. Travers Morgan & Partners. 1967. Report on Belfast Urban Motorway (to) Ministry of Development (and) Belfast Corporation. Belfast: R. Travers Morgan & Partners N.I.

Building Design Partnership. 1969. Belfast Urban Area Plan. London 16 Gresse St., W1P 2DA: Building Design Partnership.

Belfast Urban Area Plan 2001. 1987. Belfast: H.M.S.O.

Department of the Environment. Planning Service. 2004. Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan 2015 (BMAP). Belfast: DOE Planning Service.

(4)  This is largely a fantasy. The neighbourhoods through which the Belfast motorways were proposed to run were, mostly, inadequate Victorian slums not fit for purpose. This is not to say that they were not without unique townscape value, but they were far from ideal and action was needed. More will be said about this later on.

(5) Ibid. Page 54

(6)  Although only Robert and Stuart would go on to actually practice architecture with Douglas becoming a doctor instead.

(7)  Ibid. Page 11

(8)  Ibid. Page 15

(9)  Ibid. Page 27

(10)  Ibid. Page 43

(11)  Ibid. Page 53

(12)  Ibid. Page 55

(13)  Ibid. Page 69

100 Day Presentation

This is my first attempt at Video Blogging. I thought some of the concepts and diagrams would benefit from genuine human intonation, as opposed to dry text. It's also an attempt for me to get over the hatred of my own voice.

This is the presentation I prepared for my 100 day viva, held on 11 Jan 2013, thankfully I passed. Feedback welcome!

A Research Proposal

I'm sure some of you have wondered what the hell most of what I discuss has to do with architecture or, or indeed how I can reconcile the architectural thinking with this nonsense. Well...here we go...

The following is a report on what I hope to accomplish. More in depth material to follow.

Introduction - Context

The question ‘What is Architecture’ has never really been adequately answered, at least not in the contemporary era. The answer ‘Architecture is a social art’ comes pretty close in my opinion. This phrase, however, raises yet more questions, asking us to delve into what the word ‘social’ really means. It was this line of thinking which lead me to write ‘The Destruction of Architecture’ as my MArch dissertation, bringing me into contact with the work of Martin Heidegger and the new field of Social Neuroscience.

This gathering of ideas has allowed me to interrogate my own feelings and intentions as a designer. Being able to interrogate the sociology of the client or prospective users of the design enables the production of a more precise design brief. Additionally, having an awareness of my  own attitudes towards a client or possible user allows me to adjust these feelings should they be unbalanced. 

It is my intention to develop these ideas into a cohesive multi-disciplinary model which can be used to critique acts-of-design. As it has enabled me to become more aware of my motivations and prejudices (latent or otherwise) I believe it could be used to investigate the motivations and prejudices of other designers. In short, I would like to develop a model of ‘reflexive design.’

When I began to expand the model I realised that the smaller the piece of deign the more nuanced it’s social properties. On the other hand, the larger the piece of design, and the more diverse social groups who use/interact with it, the more explicit the social effects should become. It was this, along with a pre-existing interest, which lead me to a critique of urban planning in the city of Belfast. 

As a city which can be perceived as divided, conciliated, ripe for regeneration, or a cultural battleground, Belfast is a city of multiple spatial interpretations and should therefore provide a fascinating testing ground for this new sociological model.

Methodology (Aims and Objectives)

Develop Model

The model is still in a relatively basic form. In order to develop it further I propose an extensive lit. review and interpretation of ideas. There is a significant amount of literature on sociology and philosophy and it’s application to architecture/urbanism, not to mention the emerging field of Social Neuroscience which few design theorists have considered.

Apply Model - Belfast’s Planning ‘Habitus’

Once the model has been further developed I then propose to investigate planning in Belfast. These issues have interested me for several years now, first being brought to my attention when taking part in the first Forum for Alternative Belfast summer school. It became clear to me then that Belfast’s urban and social problems haven’t all been caused by ‘The Troubles.’

The model could be used to interrogate the intentions of Belfast’s planners, both past and present. I propose a literature review on Belfast's planning history which could then be developed into a speculative ‘Reflexive history.’ I then propose to carry out a series of interviews and critiques of planning maps to delve into Belfast’s ‘Planning Habitus.’

Test Model - Belfast Urban Analysis

I should now be able to define a series of study areas based on planning decisions and intentions past and present. Once defined I can  select an ‘Alternative Habitus’ within these areas, one which is embedded in the lived experience of the area.

A methodology for interrogating this Habitus will need to be developed based upon the context of the Habitus itself. This mapping of the ‘Alternative Habitus’ can then be compared with the ‘Planning Habitus’ and conclusions can be drawn. I will then return to the theoretical model and appraise it based on these conclusions.

The Model So Far

This model is based upon the rejection of post-enlightenment metaphysics and the idea that the subjectivity of the mind conforms to the objectivity of reality. It suggests that we can never be said to know objective reality, but that we conform to a socialised interpretation of it. The following terms are key to the model.

Value can be attributed to anything which stimulates the human senses; a product of human homeostasis.

Use-value can be attributed to anything that directs our action on the world; an awareness of a human want or need.

Phenomena possesses both value and use-value.

Projects comprise of linked together phenomena and are aimed toward the satisfaction of the identified want or need.

Exchange-value is a communicable use-value; something which identifies the want or need of more than one person.

Commodities possess value, use-vale and exchange-value. They are socialised phenomena.

Habitus is comprised of commodified sets of projects, the Platonic way-of-being of a collection of people achieved through an agreement reached using social discourse.

Cultural-capital is achieved by subscribers to a Habitus who perform or act within the Habitual guidelines in an exemplary fashion.

Political discourse occurs when two or more Habitual constructs occupy the same space enabling more than one way-of-being to exist simultaneously utilising conflict or compromise.

Mapping

Recent research into the philosophical underpinnings of mapping reinforces the reflexive model outlined above. Long regarded as the objective representation of space, the underlying philosophy and sociology of cartography has been challenged by the interdisciplinary field of social geography over the past decade and mapping is now acknowledged as being closely related to the metaphysical conception of space and territoriality.

Maps, in the traditional Cartesian view, are accurate representations of objective reality. To use Heidegger’s description of the enlightenment model, if our relationship with the world is similar to that of water being inside the glass then mapping attempts to describe the glass which contains us. However, using our reflexive model we can now describe the production of a map as the commodification of a spatial understanding. In the introduction to the volume ‘Mappings,’ Denis Cosgrove describes this as the move from an objective view of mapping to “an opaque view...which takes account of the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influences which shape the outcome of such transfers.”

Maps, then, can be described as a representation of the spatiality of the Habitus to which the cartographer acts as agent.

Mapping and Territory

One of the primary reasons for maps appears to be demarcation of territory, often achieved through an agreement resulting from political discourse between two or more Habitual constructs. Demarcation of territory also manifests as a dominant Habitus exerting power over another Habitus and enforcing a particular conception of spatiality. The mystification of mapping as an objective representation of space has meant that most of the time this enforcement goes unchallenged.

This territoriality, agreed or enforced, is then represented on the map. In the lived experience of the space, however, territoriality appears more fluid. Boundaries are often arranged around commodified elements of landscape which have a use-value and exchange-value related to material or strategic resources. These social and political values are rarely manifested in physical space. We may be able to perceive a hill, river or vein of precious metal, but unless we are privy to specific social, political or economic languages we cannot relate the physical world to the social construct of the boundary, and different Habitual constructs will imbue these elements with different values.

Mapping only refers to the politicisation of territory. This negotiation is carried out on a daily basis within the city as people, as agents of a given Habitus, build and dwell in the Heideggerian sense. Belfast, as a conflicted city, forces this more nuanced social discourse into political discourse manifesting itself in tribal symbolism to signify territories not represented on any official map of the city. This language of symbols can be viewed as a sort of 1:1 mapping of the city, a representation of the city overlaid onto the city itself.

This sectarian manifestation of territoriality is an extreme example, however. The city is awash with Habitual symbols and indicators. No one person is voiced in them all, but the languages are writ-large in the city fabric for those who can read them.

Mapping allows us to re-present (as opposed to represent) the city, but as active agents within the space of the city we are constantly doing this ourselves as we build and dwell as part of Habitual groups. The re-presentation of the city has as much an effect on the space as the space has on it.

Belfast: A Case Study

I wrote the following as a way of convincing myself that I need a practical foundation for my current research, something I'm not totally convinced of. I got a bit emotional near the end, forgive me!

I hope to frame the theoretical ideas of my research with practical ‘on-the-ground’ observations. I have chosen Belfast as a case study, not just because it’s the city in which I live, but because it raises a set of interesting ontological questions with which I could interrogate the, at times, difficult to fathom conceptual notions of prime interest.

When dealing with the shift from architecture as an objective practice to a subjective art, I will inevitably be dealing with notions of individual and communal identity, particularly with regards to how the autonomous entities we refer to as conscious human beings organise themselves into sets of communities which, in turn, arrange themselves into societies. This will then in turn allow us to say something about designing spaces for these individuals, communities and societies.

Belfast, as a contested city, has been dealing with a magnified version of these issues, with particular regard to the period starting in the late 1960s up to now. Up to this time Belfast was experiencing significant growth, leading to severe strain on the city’s transport network. The famous ‘Matthew Plan’ introduced a stopline to Belfast’s development along with a series of ‘new towns’ to absorb any excess population who could not be accommodated within city limits.

This was closely followed by plans for a new urban motorway which was to take the form of a ringroad right round the urban core, proposed in 1967 and followed by the Belfast Urban Area Plan in 1969. The primary idea of this plan was, based on a projection that the growth of the city’s population would continue, to create a series of 12 district centres which would serve the primary core, with specific amenities including shopping, leisure and education, provided at a district level. Co-ordinated ‘slum clearance’ was also proposed.

This plan corresponded with the beginning of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, often perceived to have started in Belfast with the burning of 44 catholic homes in Bombay Street in the west of the city in August 1969. The riots that ensued, coupled with attacks on civil rights marches by police, lead to the re-emergence of the IRA. Soon after the loyalist UVF was formed.

The explosion of violence that followed resulted in a sharp decline in Belfast’s population, making the 1967 Belfast Urban Motorway and 1969 Belfast Urban Area Plan, both of which were based on continued population growth, essentially irrelevant. On top of this, there was wide-scale opposition to both proposals, particularly from the residents of north and west Belfast who were to be either displaced or traumatically affected by the motorway plans.

This manifested itself with the idea of ‘community action,’ made evident by the Save The Shankill campaign and the Lower Falls Residents Committee, whose tactics ranged from grassroots political lobbying to threats of violence against the council workers and contractors dispatched to clear the slums. These groups acted on the assumption that, since the plans laid out by the Belfast Urban Motorway and the Urban Area Plan were now essentially unneeded yet were still going ahead, the work proposed for west and north Belfast was intended to fragment these ‘troublesome communities’ and move them away from the city centre. How else could anyone justify the systematic deconstruction of this particular way of life, as embodied in the old Victorian terraces?

Thanks to ongoing resistance from the residents coupled with the escalation of the violence, the majority of these plans were shelved. However, a significant amount of the ‘slum clearance’ went ahead, particularly on the lower Falls, and phase 1 of the Urban Motorway went ahead, albeit in the altered sunken version of ‘The Westlink’ (see above). These measures were enough to blight the area, blight which is still significant to this day.

At the same time, due to the co-ordinated paramilitary violence against businesses in the city centre, the infamous ‘ring of steel’ (see below) began to take shape around the city centre. Beginning with informal checkpoints and military presence on major routes in and out of the city core, security measures intensified over the 1980s to the point where citizens who wanted to access the city core were made to queue up to pass through turnstyles in ten foot high steel walls, only being granted access once their shopping bags, purses and briefcases had been searched and they had been frisked by military personnel. This led to a negation of ownership with regards to the city. The city centre was owned by someone else, be they military or paramilitary.

This removal of people from the city centre, be it through intimidation, both sectarian and state sponsored, or physical removal, both sectarian and state sponsored, coupled with a denial of civic ownership still profoundly defines Belfast today. The physical conflict has gradually dies out since the ceasefires of the early 1990s, causing politicians to hail the success of the ‘peace process.’ The sterilised neutrality of the city centre along with the extreme blight of inner city neighborhoods suggests that the conflict has changed fronts. We now have an ontological conflict.

In their article ‘Redrawing cognitive maps of conflict: Lost spaces and forgetting in Belfast’ Catherine Switzer and Sara McDowell describe how Belfast city centre is totally devoid of any official memorials or markers for the at times appalling atrocities commited in the past 40 years. Oxford Street bus station, a building that became synonymous with ‘Bloody Friday,’ has been scoured from the street and replaced with a contemporary office complex. The reports of eye-witnesses on the ground that day are gruesomely descriptive, comparable to reports coming out of Kosovo and Syria in recent years. Yet this traumatic event goes unmarked spatially, consisting only of individual memory and official documents. 

When we compare this to a city like Berlin, where a large number of extraordinarily traumatic incidents were focussed over a relatively short period of time, these events are writ large in Berlin’s urban structure. The Mitte area alone is replete with plaques and memorials, the most significant and moving being the Book Burning memorial in Bebelplatz and Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

This failure to deal with the past not only leads to a culturally vacuous urban centre which becomes the domain for the tourist and the shopkeep, but also a more significant problem. As Switzer and McDowell note, there are memorials and plaques outside the city centre, each community choosing to memorialise specific events within their own areas. This causes misremembered and highly editorialised versions of these events to be passed down the generations, reinforcing the ‘us and them’ tradition. Peter Shirlow describes this as “The criminilisation of the ‘other’ community and the failure to recognise (that) suffering was endured within both communities...”

What we need is a meaningfully culturally vibrant city centre which goes beyond gaudy tourist attractions, polished glass shopping centres and the halcyon days of linen and shipbuilding, beginning to speak of what we’ve been through and confront us with how truly awful it was in our day-to-day civic engagements. This will enable us to move forwards and mark off how far we’ve come. More than this, it will allow us to reclaim our city before someone else does.