Belfast: We Are Not Going Away
From our Foreign Correspondent
Ireland, of course, is not Britain. The Morning Star newspaper always runs reportage from Belfast with the proviso ‘from our foreign correspondent’. Belfast has a place in a book which claims to deal with ‘urban Britain’ only in the sense that it’s still part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so any reader who is irked by its inclusion should bear in mind that it is used on these strictly limited grounds. And no offence is intended when I say that the first feeling when in the Northern Irish capital is one of intense familiarity, and that after two visits, that feeling stuck. Intense familiarity is an understatement, in fact. Belfast appears as a place which has faced every single one of the problems that have beset British cities for the last half-century. Depopulation of the inner city and ballooning of exurbs, drastic deindustrialization, the favouring of the car and hence neglect of public transport, ring roads that brutally sever the poor from the centre, furiously divided communities, walls, fences and gates around residential areas, 1980s riverside Enterprise Zones, post-1997 redevelopment of ex-industrial space into cultural centres and luxury apartments, rise of the inner-city shopping mall, urban riots … Belfast has been subject to every one of these, to a ferocious degree. The curious thing is that it has suffered them for entirely different reasons, at least on the face of it.
Guilty Labour voters in the 2000s in the UK would often mull over the reasons why they were putting their ‘x’ where they were, and come up with a short list. ‘The minimum wage … working families tax credit … Sure Start … oh yeah, and peace in Northern Ireland.’ A Tory Party occasionally known as the Conservative and Unionist Party was never going to be able to achieve the latter, but Blair (or rather, Mo Mowlam with a bit of last-minute grandstanding from Peter Mandelson) did genuinely appear to end three decades of low-intensity civil war. As a measure of that success, in a few years Provisional IRA weapons were handed in, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness were sharing jokes, the RUC no longer officially existed, and everything was apparently going to get back to normal, whatever that might be. At this distance, you have to go back and read anything written between the 1920s and the 1990s to realize just how completely unexpected this outcome would once have seemed. Obviously, most of us thinking this thought while going to the polls hadn’t ever been to Northern Ireland (I certainly hadn’t), gave barely a damn about whether it stayed part of the UK (it’s hard to imagine any British government not reliant on Unionist support caring much), and experienced it only via the mainland bombing campaigns of the early-to-mid-90s, on much-loved landmarks like Canary Wharf and the Manchester Arndale. As Patrick Keiller notes of his wandering Londoners in 1992, they didn’t seem to think that what was happening in Ireland had anything to do with them.
All that said, when talking about Belfast, and Belfast’s built fabric, it would be crass to simply take aim at the mess it has made of itself, as if it hadn’t relatively recently recovered from three decades of urban warfare. It’s possible that buildings like the Waterfront Hall, St Anne’s Square or the Obel Tower genuinely symbolize to many people here the fact that they can now walk the streets with any but the most residual fear of car bombs, let alone routine assassinations and beatings. The Phoenix-from-the-Ashes public art is as bad here as everywhere else, if not worse, but different criteria surely exist when a city really has emerged from what Belfast has emerged from. All that said, with all those caveats … Belfast remains an extremely unnerving, disconcerting and disturbing city, a nightmarish vision of what most British cities could quite easily become, what lies just around the corner for them. That vision is taken out of a context in which it’s actually an improvement, to be sure – so that should be borne in mind in what follows.
A Colonial Composite
Belfast looks at first like a ‘regenerated’ northern English industrial city, and a very impressive one. It’s bigger and grander than most, proud and demonstrative in its architecture – a Leeds or even a Manchester, rather than a Preston or a Wakefield. Initial acquaintance shows a city a great deal more familiar, in fact, than anything in Scotland or even much of Wales. This might be because it’s the protracted consequence of an annexation and a plantation, unlike the relatively equitable Unions with the UK’s other two Celtic countries. That is, it’s colonial: something supported by the astounding scale of Belfast City Hall, an Edwardian baroque municipal palace of stupendous grandiosity and bulk, centred around an immense Wren-like dome, comparable with the colonial administrative cathedrals of New Delhi, Mumbai or Durban (the latter was apparently an exact copy). The architect, Alfred Brumwell Thomas, specialized in these civic monstrosities, designing versions for Stockport and Woolwich, but neither is as massive and overpowering as this. As a piece of urban planning, it’s as authoritarian as can be, but not ineffective. Central Belfast is a gridiron, like those other Victorian shipbuilding centres Glasgow and Barrow, and City Hall is placed right at the heart of it. Around it, in Donegall Square, are commercial buildings that emulate its scale, insurance offices in the most pompous and invigorating twilight-of-empire fashion.
That’s not all that looks familiar – in fact, combined colonization by the English and the Scots seems to have brought a certain amount of equal importation from each. Belfast’s earlier incarnation as Linenopolis, a textile centre to rival those of Yorkshire and Lancashire, has left several Ruskinian red-brick/Venetian warehouses and mills in the centre. In the south of the grid, their height, their intense colour, and their sheer walls give a dramatic effect reminiscent of Whitworth Street in Manchester or Little Germany in Bradford. There’s a lot of infill that mostly follows the height and streetline, hotels and office blocks of little imagination but which don’t disrupt the effect. The turn-of-the-century shipbuilding metropolis has left buildings that could easily have escaped from the Glasgow grid, classical and baroque structures in red sandstone imported from Dumfries. There’s a fine progression of them in one corner. The first, on a dramatic corner site, is Bank Buildings, designed in 1900 by W. H. Lynn (designer, as we’ve seen, of Barrow Town Hall) – sandstone on a steel frame with wide, protomodernist plate-glass windows, a building that many a British city would be envious of, that wouldn’t look out of place on either Buchanan Street or Piccadilly, currently with the exalted status of housing Primark. The Central Library, almost next door and also by Lynn, is similarly Glaswegian in its strongly moulded sandstone classicism; then the Leeds-esque mills take over again. Some of the more dignified classical buildings in the centre, such as Hamilton Street or the Custom House, evoke the disciplined eighteenth-century planning of Dublin, as if to redress the balance.
The second half of the twentieth century has granted Belfast a similar bequest to other towns that got rich on heavy engineering and textiles. There’s a slightly too sober but very well-made bank by BDP, who kept an office here throughout the Troubles; there’s a good Festival Style block with Scando patterns and zigzag balconies, and there’s a few not especially interesting speculative office blocks, rightly proud and soaring but devoid of ideas or expressiveness. The comparisons cease to be with northern England and western Scotland by this point, they’re more with Birmingham. Belfast’s 1980s and 90s buildings are masonry structures on concrete frames, in the sort of blocky, rather coarse postmodernism that you see so often in the centre of the official Second City. At times, when walking round some of the more extensively redeveloped central districts, it’s only the weather and the mountains in the near distance that remind you you’re not in the West Midlands, or in the more historic areas, the West Riding. The geography, at least, is very local.
By the second day in Belfast you start to register something different in the centre. A 1980s building like the BBC’s Northern Ireland department, designed in 1984 by the BBC’s in-house architects, employs what to the untrained eye might look like a standard piece of postmodernist vernacular, albeit with art deco rather than Victoriana as the inspiration for its rectilinear mannerisms. Then you gradually realize you’re looking at a blast wall, at a structure expressly designed to withstand car bombs. There are many approaches to this problem. The Europa Hotel, bombed an impressive twenty-seven times, is from a distance a fairly normal V-shaped mass of commercial modernism, but up close it’s hard to avoid the weird Vegas-like vestibule: a series of bizarre columned spaces which must either have doubled as a screen against bombs, or been imposed as a celebration of the fact that there aren’t any bombs any more. You don’t see much built in glass until pretty recently, for obvious reasons. The earliest is BDP’s 1991 Castle Court shopping mall, a somewhat Richard Rogers-ish piece of bulky high-tech, with ornamental steel frame and a strangely placed short brick wall blocking off one side of it. It’s not until my second visit that I realize that here I was walking obliviously past the city centre’s only ‘peace line’. The most confident post-war (the recent war, that is) structure is Victoria Square, again by BDP, a complex which is a comprehensive redevelopment by any other name. Much of it is taken up by a shopping mall with a large glass dome, to complement those on Donegall Square, with what must have been intended as a hint at the Reichstag and the post-Wende rhetoric of non-ideological ‘transparency’. There’s pseudo-public access through, and a superb view from the top of the dome. The scheme expands round the street to encompass some inner-city urban regen housing, in the form of a long street block with a tall tower. The architectural language is about right, a slightly Brutalist, vigorous red brick, although the jagged roof is a very early-2000s mannerism. It’s not that hard to make a transparent shopping mall; a transparent law courts is a different problem. The Laganside Courts, opened in 2002, were designed by Hurd Rolland; their website claims they are ‘one of the leading national practices in the law and order sector’. The building has a conspicuous lack of any but the tiniest windows, which suggests that certain things are not changing. There’s a supergrass trial in progress on my second trip here.
Our Legacy, Your Future
Towards the River Lagan, there’s a very nice juxtaposition. On one side, the Victoria Clock Tower, a leaning Gothic folly that, local drollery notes, ‘has both the time and the inclination’. Opposite is the city centre’s best post-war building, J. J. Brennan’s Transport House, a tower and wing clad in green tiles with a magnificent constructivist mosaic running down the façade depicting ships, cranes, and robotic workers marching towards the socialist future that evidently didn’t come to pass, in an era where the biggest workers’ action was the sectarian syndicalism of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike in 1974. As a reminder of ideals that have had purchase here at certain times – from the United Irishmen in the 1790s to the solidarity strikes with Red Clydeside in 1919 – it’s not just an interesting building, it’s an important one. Transport House was occupied until recently by the T&G’s successor Unite, who should be ashamed for abandoning this building; the thought of them now occupying some business park in ‘Greater Belfast’ is faintly heartbreaking.
Walk on a bit from here and the grid’s coherence is replaced by the mess of speculation. That’s especially sharp where the Westlink slices across the city, an urban motorway comparable in its destructive effect to the M8 more than the Westway, leaving a straggling landscape in its wake. It takes trains as well as cars at one point, which makes it feel even more weird and futuristic, with both crossing each other at angles. Under its riverside flyover you have a series of more or less derelict workshops, a basketball court, and a fence. In the distance is the New Lodge Flats, an estate of towers that recently featured in a Rihanna video, of all things. Each zigzag roof is marked by a portrait of a Republican hunger striker, though that wasn’t so clear on MTV Base. The fence itself carries a partially defaced graffito, where certain letters have been meticulously crossed out. It reads: ‘----- G------- HAS TO ANSWER --- ---- ----’. Local artist Daniel Jewesbury, showing me around, informs me this previously read ‘BARRY GILLIGAN HAS TO ANSWER FOR THIS LAND’, and refers to the chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, who is also a director at property developers Big Picture Developments.18 He has to ‘answer for this land’ because it was zoned as social housing. In 2010, in his other job as policing adviser, Gilligan was allegedly asked by a Housing Association to advise on a ‘design issue’; then his company snapped up the land, outbidding the Housing Association.
Visible from here at one point is the St Anne’s Square, a development designed by neoclassicist John Smylie. It’s a ridiculous building, an ill-proportioned neo-Georgian car park that becomes an enclosed ‘Palladian’ courtyard, with detailing so cack-handed it makes Paternoster Square look like Aldo Rossi. Whatever else might be said about their recent architecture, it’s hard to imagine Birmingham or Glasgow standing for this. A short distance from here and you’re in Laganside, the obligatory riverside brownfield Disneyland. It’s the same as any other 1980s Enterprise Zone, a Cardiff Bay or a Salford Quays, operated by a quango outside of local government control, with a tamed river created by a concrete weir whose slightly Thames Barrier-like forms make it probably Laganside’s best building. The possibility of extending inner Belfast’s coherent, legible grid was either rejected or never even considered, so the place is a collection of disconnected towers from different eras.
Era One, the BT tower and the Hilton Hotel, is still fortified, stock-brick-clad with ground-floor blast walls. The post-Good Friday agreement Era Two is more optimistic, its spec residential towers boasting lots of glass and extraneous bits and bobs, like The Boat flats’ brightly coloured picture frames, randomly hung onto the curtain wall. Like a lot of 2000s buildings, it’s going to look interesting when the cladding starts falling off. The domed Waterfront concert hall is a tad more civic, but turns its back on the river. There’s a twin-tower job in blue glass, left derelict after the financial crash that beset the south of this island even more than the other one. On the ground, Laganside is chaotic, with no coherent riverside walk. Public art entails a sprite-like steel maiden holding up a ring, or an arch, or something, at the entrance to the city from the river. This place has some sort of record for nominations to Building Design’s Carbuncle Cup award. In 2010 alone were put forward The Boat and Broadway Malyan’s Obel Tower, the tallest building in Ireland (the best of this bad bunch, to be fair, as its east façade has some grace), plus St Anne’s Square. The latter was surely robbed of victory only by the fact none of the judges had seen it first-hand. Just before it was wound up, the Laganside company put up a panel listing its achievements, with the chilling words used in the heading to this section above. The abiding impression of familiarity is not in any way dispelled by the fact that every architectural change can be related to a change in the level of conflict; as it would be, in a city where every new development between the mid-70s and the 2000s had to receive the specific approval of the British Army. The fact remains that in London, Birmingham or Manchester you can equally find a 1980s–90s brick-clad postmodernism giving way to a confident, glazed new modernism from the late ’90s onwards, seemingly solely due to changes in architectural fashion. Exactly the same thing, for apparently different reasons.
Ulster Defensible Space Association
What is described above is not so extreme, not so unusual. Stick to the centre and the only disturbing thing about the Belfast landscape is the lowest-common-denominator approach to redevelopment; its sins are the sins of other cities. Things are different once you go beyond the ring road. Drastically so. Inner Belfast, conveniently due to the Westlink, is demarcated by a cordon sanitaire of wasteland and surface car parks, with the odd marooned terrace of Victorian houses. It just serves to make the change more glaring. It’s not the most obvious barrier, though, in a city which has in one estimation forty-eight ‘peace lines’. The most famous of these is in West Belfast. The Shankill and Falls are a very short walk away from the centre, but the scarred spaces you have to go through to get there make it seem considerably longer. The road leads you over a very, very busy motorway, and then a jolly little angel with outstretched arms on a plinth informs you that you are entering the Shankill. The low quality of Belfast public art has its reasons, it’s soon clear – best to keep it neutral. When you first see the Loyalist Murals in the Shankill, you suspect they’re being kept for tourists; there are black cab tours and everything. Belfast’s equivalent to the City of God tours of Brazilian favelas, or an open-topped bus round the ruins of Detroit: the exploitation and, hopefully, neutralization of former sources of conflict and humiliation. On closer investigation it’s obvious that the notion that these are mere remnants for show is no more true of sectarianism than it’s true of shanty towns or industrial decline. This stuff is not a joke.
The Shankill, like most working-class areas of Belfast, was redeveloped from the 1980s onwards in a manner which illuminates the roots of what is usually called ‘defensible space’ planning. There are tiny, neo-Victorian houses in looping, intricate cul-de-sacs, providing vague, hostile, car-centred pedestrian spaces and a grim visual straggliness. Their many blank gable ends leave plenty of room for Oliver Cromwell, William of Orange, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. These kinds of paintings have been reclassified lately as ‘folk art’, which no doubt they are, in the sense in which Communist composer Hanns Eisler distinguished between reactionary ‘folk’ songs and revolutionary ‘mass’ songs. The glasses, moustaches and turtlenecks of the 1980s are immortalized in the portraits of various gunwielders, but these murals know they’re being looked at and consumed. Some of them have notes on them, explaining otherwise esoteric symbolism such as the Red Hand of Ulster. One less inflammatory mural features the apposite words, ‘whatever is about us not with us is not for us’. Windswept, unclaimed open space runs between the artworks. There’s a lot of graffiti as well as the murals, but of an unusual sort. Most of it isn’t even tags, but people scrawling their initials, so often and so densely that it looks like many of the streets have been randomly scribbled over. The houses are relatively new, but they look bitterly poor. A dour, brown-brick leisure centre tries to keep the kids busy, and on the Shankill Road itself, Union Jack bunting flutters in the wind. How can somewhere so evidently screwed over by successive governments of the United Kingdom find itself able to be proud of it?
The Interface Zone between the Shankill and Falls is fairly permeable. A fence running alongside a large flour mill is not so unusual; I later found that the fence is closed at night, but when it’s open you might not bat an eyelid, but for the accompanying symbolism. The two areas are divided by an industrial estate put there for that very purpose. One of the sheds is now a church, which has the slogan ‘Being a God-Influence’. Opposite, a mural welcomes you to the Shankill Road, if you’re going in the opposite direction. ‘We are defiant, proud, welcoming’. The welcome is a little lessened by the fact that the hither-gesturing hand on the painting is red. Then, past the fence, and you’re in the Falls Road. There’s one major difference, in that the murals are more right-on, so despite being English, being a Socialist I feel considerably less ill at ease. The Battle of the Boyne is replaced with a protest mural against the occupation of Palestine and a commemoration of the Nakba; Palestinian flags rather than Union Jacks (or more interestingly, the Tricolour) fly from the street. Hunger strikers and Republican taxi services aside, on the Falls murals Frederick Douglass replaces King Billy; Che Guevara appears instead of Cromwell.
Imagery is imagery, but in terms of architecture and planning, the Falls area shows absolutely identical defensible-space urbanism to the Shankill. Tiny semis and terraces around closes, with easily sealed-off entry and exit points, with grim ‘public realm’. There are minor differences – the houses are in red brick rather than grey pebble-dash, and mercifully there are two points of architectural punctuation. The twin towers of St Peter’s Cathedral, in the gaunt and spindly Celtic Gothic you can find at St Finbarr’s in Cork, rise impressively over the Defensible hutches. Slightly further along the Falls Road, there’s a good new leisure centre to keep the kids off the streets, a design by local architects Kennedy Fitzgerald in a brightly coloured but cliché-free modernist manner, looking positively optimistic in the circumstances. And there is a tower block: the Divis Tower, not exactly an imaginative design but recently renovated and decent-looking. Information panels remind you that it originally formed part of a dense, hard to police mid-rise deck-access complex, the Divis Flats, which was demolished and replaced with the houses you see today. The Divis Tower might just have been retained because it had, until recently, a British Army observation post on the roof.
As the most famous sectarian divide in Belfast, the Shankill-Falls model of urbanism could be considered something specific to Belfast, a form that emerged purely because of the need to stop people’s houses being burnt down and car bombs from getting into housing estates. The late Martin Pawley listed the innovative features in a 1997 essay on architecture under the influence of terrorism: ‘No new housing estate can be easily entered in a vehicle by one route and left by another. Except in a few old residential areas and where street patterns render it impossible, no car park or access road can be found within 12 metres of a residential building.’19 Similarly, the open plans of streets, hard to police and easy to riot, were made into something controllable and enclosed. And yet it’s hard to see this as remotely specific to Belfast (or Derry, or Portadown). In Liverpool in the 1980s a Trotskyist council replaced towers and tenements with a strikingly similar pattern of brick cul-de-sacs separated by perimeter walls; the suggestions of the ur-postmodernist Essex Design Guide in the mid-1970s enshrined the notion of ‘Defensible Space’ in speculative and public housing. Barratt Homes are planned in a not dissimilar way. And in the UK, rather than submitting plans to the army, we submit them to the police, in the form of Secured by Design, a legal requirement for any new area of social housing. The guidelines are almost exactly the same. What a visit to West Belfast does is make crystal clear the military roots of contemporary urban planning.
Lyrical South Belfast
There are parts of Belfast that weren’t completely redesigned into encampments. Much of South Belfast, in the vicinity of the University, is distinctly more normal. After walking back to the centre, you walk in a straight line past, first of all, the Markets, a working-class area which lacks aggressively territorial murals, but which is planned in exactly the same ‘defensible’ manner as Shankill and Falls. The neo-Victorian architecture here is a little stronger, with nicely patterned brickwork, but the urbanism is identical, and perhaps worse, because the cordon sanitaire is less harsh – you’re much closer to the centre, and it meets the grid via a pallid loop of terraces with a grass verge in front. Walk along the main road rather than through the maze of the Markets, and the break is not nearly so sharp. There are some decent industrial buildings, and a convincing, Brutalist-ish mill conversion at Somerset & Co, now Somerset Studios, where harsh concrete and red brick is reconfigured as chic rather than ignored altogether. There’s also plenty of very luxurious and blingy-looking restaurants, something which makes it feel even more like Birmingham. Terraces both Regency and Victorian file off from here, and they don’t appear to be divided by walls, bunting, murals or conspicuous swathes of wasteland.
Queen’s University itself is a red-brick complex comparable to the University of Newcastle or other northern English colleges, a Victorian-Tudor style with some good modernist additions. On the other side is the Infirmary, a clad and tamed ’70s futurist tower now dressed in white and gold. The real architectural interest lies further south, at the Botanic Gardens. Here, next to each other, are two buildings that are as original as anything anywhere in the UK or Eire, or elsewhere – two that guarantee Belfast’s place in the most recondite of architectural history books. In the gardens itself is a Palm House by Richard Turner, who would later go on to design a much larger and more famous version in Kew, before the credit was swiped by Decimus Burton. This is not quite as freakish and epic, but it shows that the leap into ferro-vitreous dreamland in the 1840s was not entirely a matter of the imperial centre; it means that even modernist architecture, as much as modernist literature, may unexpectedly have to trace itself to Ireland. It’s a bulbous, organic structure, crowded and rusty inside, and very appropriate to the prodigiously grey and rainy climate, a fantastical tropical insect set down in a darkened corner.
Francis Pym’s mid-1960s extension to the Ulster Museum is just opposite. The existing Museum, begun in 1929 and left half-finished, was in a similar Edwardian baroque manner to the City Hall; it suggests that inter-war Ulster was as backwards as England with respect to twentieth-century architecture, a pallid, mechanistic and bland form of imperial classicism. Pym’s extension is an act of aggression, there’s absolutely no doubt about that – the façade is continued in Suprematist forms that owe more to the Arkhitektons of Kasimir Malevich than to any then-existing architecture. The coursing of the unfinished building is first continued in the extension, then suddenly broken up with a series of concrete geometries, wrapping around the side, where they form a fragmented, montaged façade; a Corbusian bull-horn profile runs along the bottom, to offer shelter and entrance. The extension keeps to the unfinished building’s scale and classical symmetry, while making its protest very apparent. Under the curved concrete entrance is a café in green glass, the result of a recent refurbishment that caused apoplexy in local architects, mortified at the identikit pseudomodernism employed for a building as unique as this. As an urban object, in its parkland setting, it is still extremely powerful.
In the residential streets towards the river, Belfast’s quirks mean that what looks like a very normal working-class Victorian area of industrial terraces turns out (when I mention it to anyone who lives in the city) to be the most affluent, middle-class district of the city. For whatever reason, there isn’t a trace of sectarian imagery to be found. What you will find, just at the end of one entirely ordinary Victorian street, is O’Donnell and Tuomey’s recently completed Lyric Theatre. This is well-made contextual modernism, in the ‘other tradition’ of modernist humanism that extends from Alvar Aalto to the British Library – the kind of building that makes architecture critics go dewy-eyed, muttering how they don’t make them like that any more. There’s no doubt that it approaches its site – a corner at the end of a descending row of terraces, opposite the Lagan – with great intelligence. The architects negotiate the slope, the gradation from the houses to the presence needed in a civic building, and the deep red of the materials with skill, wit and architectonic imagination, providing a series of different and complementary views depending on where the building is seen: the total opposite to the one-liners of Regeneration. For building in a residential and historically coherent area without resorting to the pieties of the vernacular and the ‘reference’, it is a textbook case of how to design well. Hence the applause. I have two caveats, though, one petty, one not. The latter concerns the florescence all the way down the sheer brick façade, an easily avoidable defect that makes it look considerably less old-school in its constructional expertise. The former is the absurdly overpriced café. Regardless – all three of these buildings are worth an architectural pilgrimage in themselves, although the notion that architectural visits could help the city in some way is hard to credit. Especially so on the other side of the river, in East Belfast.
‘It was fine when it left us’
I thought it would be interesting and informative to see if it was possible to walk from the residential working-class areas of East Belfast to the new ‘Titanic Quarter’ adjacent. It is – but I felt lucky to be alive at the end of it. Not because of the sectariana, alarming as that is, but for more prosaic reasons. At first, the route I took from Laganside across the river was, again, only particularly depressing if you’ve not visited similar schemes in Birmingham, Leeds or elsewhere; normality, again, of a sort. Nobody in the UK would bat an eyelid at the apartment blocks, with their warehouse ‘references’ and warehouse joylessness; nor at the Thames Valley-like retail-park style of a banks’ and outsourcers’ HQ, the Lesley Exchange, with its glass stair towers and ‘stone’ cladding. Only the still very fortified-looking Central Railway Station suggests anything aberrant. The streets are Victorian, though the very wide arterial roads are not. In the distance are a pair of structures that are striking in their gigantism – the monumental cranes of Harland and Wolff, shipbuilders, who still carry on a small modicum of trade nearby. The cranes have names – Samson and Goliath. Harland and Wolff were, of course, the builders of the Titanic. I grew up in the port from which the Titanic sailed, a city which now has an only slightly smaller population than Belfast, although Belfast’s metropolitan ambitions are as clear in Samson and Goliath as in Donegall Square. You’ll have seen these cranes already if you’ve approached Belfast from the north, or from the sea – gaunt Sant’Elian archways that frame views of the city from the Westlink. They were installed in the ’70s as a gesture of confidence in the industrial city, Troubles or no Troubles. That their function is presently vestigial is hardly evidence for the uniqueness of Belfast’s problems. Tall, held up on alternately thin and bulkily angular supports, with mini-cranes on each side, they embody the sort of industry the Italian futurists fantasized about. They appear on postcards for sale at the airport.
The street signs round here are bilingual, Gaelic and English. The area is Short Strand, a tiny nationalist enclave in loyalist territory. Its urban form is more irregular than in the two rival defensible spaces of Shankill and Falls, as much larger Victorian fragments survive, albeit with the streetline around them completely reconfigured. A long row of terraces is next to a huge cleared site, on which Housing Associations plan to build. Some of these red-brick terraces could easily be in Middlesbrough; others have doorways that look almost Georgian. In amongst them are several closes and cul-de-sacs placed as enclosure, breakers-up of the grid; bungalows and even a bit of quasi-modernist Aalto-esque infill. The murals are, in some cases, pretty mild – Sinn Fein electoral campaigns, people learning Gaelic, kids playing in the Victorian terraces with the cranes in the background. The mural to INLA hunger striker Mickey Devine, surmounted by a red flag dedicated to the small, ultra-violent, far-left Republican organization is as heated as it gets. After that, you pass through the Peace Line. A tiny space lined with walls, that could easily have (and probably at times had) a turnstile, and, once again, the houses are the same and the murals are completely different.
Again, 1980s–90s cul-de-sacs interspersed with small nineteenth-century workers’ barracks, again very obvious poverty; the only unlikeness is in the presence of Union Jack and red-hand bunting, or the content of the gable-end murals. The latter are, here, utterly schizophrenic. There’s the Titanic, ‘ship of dreams’ on one wall; on another, ‘NO MORE’, and two children shaking hands over a graveyard, with a poem underneath celebrating the end of the violence. Another is being painted as I walk past. It’s almost monochrome, showing a funeral procession guarded by two balaclava’d men with machine guns in the foreground. Each of the marching figures wears dark glasses and a face mask. Later, on my way back to the centre, I see more in this stark, monochrome, violent style, presumably by the same artist – commissioned, I’m told, by the local commander for the Ulster Volunteer Force, who is alleged to have been behind a full-scale riot here a few months ago in June 2011, in which shots were fired at police; somewhat overshadowed by the riots across the Irish Sea two months later. I also see a Peace Line more pointedly defensive than any others – it’s a rampart, brick blast walls with metal fences above, taller than any of the houses than run alongside it. The houses near the Interface have permanent metal grilles over their windows, as I noticed coming back from the Titanic Quarter.
Northern Ireland, which for pretty obvious reasons has a large public sector, is one of David Cameron’s targets for ‘shrinking the state’; one of the allegedly babied areas that must be weaned. Those youths who were fighting in Short Strand were largely unemployed, and there will be a lot more of them soon. That’s not to suggest that there has not been private-sector investment; its flagship is that aforementioned Quarter, which takes up a chunk of the Harland and Wolff site. To get there from residential East Belfast, you have to traverse a swathe of motorway without any pedestrian crossings, and here is where walking feels a little like taking your life in your hands. Someone has obviously walked it before you, though, as there’s a small piece of graffiti on the concrete of the bridge, in small handwriting so you have to look closely: ‘Only the English understand cruelty. Cunt.’ There is literally no other way to the place on foot; the route from here to there is about as friendly to the walker as the route from Bluewater to Ebbsfleet International. This is apt enough, as the planner and architect for the Quarter is Bluewater’s creator-of-community, Eric Kuhne.
The neighbour here is not a disused quarry or a container port but a residential, working-class area, and one that might well be in some straits. It would have been nice to try and make some attempt to connect the Quarter to East Belfast. Enterprise Zones are not made of such things, and in fairness Belfast City Council would have had to demolish part of the motorway to do so. It is instead, in an act of pure folly, being extended. When you finally reach it, the roads and the mild-modernist offices and hotels that loop around them are planned as an arc, which must have made a pretty pattern on the drawing board. The ‘public’ part entails an architecturally inoffensive college and the Odyssey Arena, a gross, lumbering, introverted troll of a building. It gets really exciting, though, when you make it to the point where the Titanic Quarter meets the remains of the shipyards. A shattered ticket booth for a car park, an acre or so of rubble, the cranes in sublime proximity across the sheds, and a sandstone office block very like the one in Barrow. Behind it, waving its arms in the air so you notice it, is the Titanic Visitor Centre, which is the Icon; it takes the sharp, exploded forms and metallic surfaces of an old Danny Libeskind building, the sort that was supposed to symbolize conflict and disjunction, and gives it beaux-arts symmetry, which may not have been the original idea. The symbolism here is not at all ambiguous. It’s an iceberg. Do you see? The official slogan for this apocalypse, found on the advertisements, is: ‘The Titanic Quarter. We used to make ships here – now we make communities.’
The Demarcation Breaks Up
It would be hugely unfair to give the impression that all of this is going unchallenged. In fact, there’s a degree of ideas and resistance here which the cities that Belfast resembles would be lucky to have. For instance, the Forum for Alternative Belfast have published a plan for building on the surface car parks and wastes around the ring road, in order not merely to eliminate the subtopian slurry that surrounds the grid, but to establish some tangible coherence to the city, to give the rest of it the easy link between centre and residential area that only South Belfast has at present. It’s the sort of idea that has hardly helped make Manchester a more equal city, and it may be easily criticized as Richard Rogers-issue sermonizing on the virtues of dense and compact cities; but Belfast obviously needs this sort of intervention more than most places. A simple visual and spatial link between West Belfast and the centre wouldn’t solve its problems, but would surely make a positive difference; even more a real link between the Titanic Quarter and Short Strand. Architect Mark Hackett of the Forum drove me around North Belfast at the end of my visit. It was the only part of the journey conducted by car, and that became something I was very pleased about. Here, past Crumlin Road and leading on to Ardoyne, the relatively simple demarcation of Shankill and Falls is replaced by an illegible chaos of peace lines, both new and long-lasting. So, it’s hard to tell the difference between outer Birmingham and outer Walsall – well, here that difficulty has been militarized.
Belfast was not part of Pathfinder, the New Labour scheme to demolish working-class housing and replace it with something more aspirational; but in North Belfast you could be forgiven for thinking it had. Once more, the Northern Irish capital appears to be doing much the same thing with its cities as England, only for what are on the face of it different reasons. Here, sometimes nondescript and sometimes handsome Victorian housing is left derelict and then demolished when tensions along an Interface Zone start to run too high; in the process, large swathes of the northern suburbs look like they’ve just faced a random V-2 attack. Next to one of these dereliction interfaces is a park, with a Berlin Wall through it to stop the youth from starting riots. Nearby, adjoining a relatively decent housing development, where there are at least vague hints of streets rather than cul-de-sacs and a convincing re-use of local red brick, is Belfast’s only privately-funded peace line. It was a condition of the development, because it was assumed that demographic changes meant that members of one of the ‘communities’ would be more likely to be living in the new development than members of the other, who had hitherto lived in that area. So their semi-detached houses have running behind them a white-painted concrete wall. In another of the battered interface areas a spit of scrubland has some shipping containers on it, on which Sina’s convenience store sells its wares. It’s a long way from East London’s outposts of Container Chic like Boxpark or Trinity Buoy Wharf. The shop serves both groups, with seats outside and a café inside. It seems to work. In their wisdom, Belfast council have refused to grant the container and its owner permission to use the site. It seems an unlikely place for a ‘stunning development’, but hope springs eternal.
Sometimes all this has positive architectural outcomes. Castellated linen mills tower over an ’80s council house noddyland; industrial estates crop up at random points, making the perimeter walls look less obvious. At the entrance back into the city centre, past the derelict Crumlin Road courthouse, slated to become flats but derelict for years (Barry Gilligan has to answer for this, too), past a heavy Victorian jail (the one which internment filled so full that the H-Blocks were built), past an Orange Hall which, apparently, recently removed its protective metal screen (reasons to be cheerful!), you find two magnificently aggressive, exuberant and soaring Victorian churches facing off against each other, the sectarian animus proving a great spur to wilfully tasteless architectural imagination. It is however a macabre pleasure, and so is Belfast urbanism in general. Here is a city riven with divisions, whose post-Troubles redevelopment has somehow multiplied walls both real and perceived. It’s incredibly disturbing, I repeat, not for its difference from the rest of the UK, but its similarity. All the factors – rampant inequality, deindustrialization, social divisions and poverty – are as familiar as the city centre’s buildings. Sectarianism might be mere torchpaper, or a particularly violent distraction from the obvious. With unemployment about to explode, what will happen here in the next few years? When Belfast is weaned off the state, will the young men of East Belfast all get jobs in the Titanic Quarter’s Premier Inn, or will they not? These questions notwithstanding, for the rest of the country, contemporary Belfast could so easily be a vision of the future. Peace lines in Clapham are not implausible.
Forum aside, there is one major cause for optimism in Belfast’s built environment. The area around Victoria Square may be booming of a Saturday afternoon, but the northern peripheries of the city centre get squalid quick; at one intersection, you have a street leading off towards the Shankill that is mostly boarded up, which in the case of the shop selling weaponry may have been a good thing. A lot of former commercial buildings here are derelict, either because they’re being sat upon by developers waiting for the recovery, or in many cases because the sites are owned by NAMA, the ‘bad bank’ that handles the Republic of Ireland’s assets. They may all of course end up as loft living solutions, but given the unlikeliness of that recovery, a major question is begged. And a particularly urgent answer is given in the Bank of Ireland building. This is in an area that could perhaps have been marketed as Belfast’s Deco Quarter, should that have had a sufficiently historic resonance. Ornate inter-war moderne buildings with strongly expressed corner façades face each other; the best of them is this Portland stone bank, its Mini-Manhattan clock tower now with a banner across it reading ‘OCCUPY BELFAST’. The wings to the street feature the slogan ‘IT’S NOT A RECESSION, IT’S A ROBBERY’. On my second visit, in January 2012, the occupiers had just turned up here, moving in from their campsite in front of Ulster University; it seemed a much smarter choice, and not just for the shelter. They were still debating what to do with the space – inside, their sleeping bags were within the tents. A homeless shelter, a social centre, a space in the heart of the city where they could hurl their defiance at it. One of the occupiers tells me: ‘Oh, we know about all the disused buildings in Belfast. We’re going to take them, one by one.’
