I’ve picked up a tweet linking to a devastating critique of the physical state of Belfast by the Belfast based architect Mark Hackett written last year. On my visits home I tend to tramp a few selected streets in my old stomping grounds of the Troubles. Naturally enough I also take in one of two of the tastefully named “Quarters,” the designation intended to preserve and develop what remains of the character of the city.
My impression is of a Belfast poised between salvation and further decline. There is an ambitious sounding and clearly well intentioned plan run by the City Council for development up to 2035. Couched in planning jargon and replete with colourful illustrations and diagrams I have less idea than better informed Belfast residents of what it amounts to. Where lies is the balance of power between the public authority and commercial developers? What is the realistic level of public investment?
Like many onlookers, I’m perched between signs of hope and deeper fears that commercial developers will create only a few meaningless patches of legoland development – Tribeca? – and maybe not even that, if urban blight spreads as a result of the twin pressures of the post Covid era and the redefinitions of sustainable development due to climate change. What sort of future is there for Victoria Square? Will the new Belfast campus of a reportedly near bankrupt Ulster University soak up most development money for years to come? Is the Glider commute the vision of the future? Can the gaping holes in the city be filled by real live residents willing and able to live together, if not ” integrated” at least in something like the old proximity? I’m pretty clear that the familiar responses of helplessness expressed as cynicism and exaggerated nostalgia will get us nowhere, if we wish to see the Belfast reborn that most of us long for.
Mark Hackett’s powerful article should be read in full. His theme is segregation by worsening sectarian division from the 1970s added to segregation by class from the early 1960s. The escape to outer suburbs and towns beyond leaving low density ghettoes in the inner city will be very difficult to reverse. Here are extracts, with thanks to him and the Architectural Review for text and photographs .
Belfast may initially appear similar to many other UK cities both in its Victorian-era brick fabric and in its contemporary disparate developments. Yet one soon encounters the dominance of roads and a realisation that surface car parks are not the exception but a norm that surrounds and peppers the city at every turn. This is a city redesigned for the car and for commuters living in the wider suburban and metropolitan area. In this, Belfast shares the characteristics of many American cities…
Only partly responsible are the prefabricated concrete walls with steel posts, layered with mesh fence growing ever taller, taller than you could throw a stone over.
These are the ‘peace walls’ of Belfast, of which the city now has approaching a hundred. The visitor, however, will be hard pressed to find or identify most of the structures – the smaller, more recent ones are strangely intimate, set between the backs of suburban houses in outer areas of the city. Others lie off main city arteries. One, however, runs for two miles out from the city: the Falls/Shankill peace line that first formed along the line of terrace houses burnt out in August 1969.
Today each side of this line has a wide new road. In places three parallel roads exist, something that may confound those who talk about ‘bringing down the walls’.
The larger roads run along the Shankill side and allow a vista of wall in picturesque brutality, softened by low level artwork, murals and the marks of international visitors. The wall is now a main tourist draw helping to support the economy of this neglected sector of the city….
A remarkable restructuring of Belfast took place between 1970 and 1990, essentially hardwiring sectarian division but moreover leading to a complete sifting of the city based on income and affluence. This social divide in the city is largely formed and defined by the urban motorway and by other large road structures. When direct rule began in 1972, a region-wide governance structure took control of all major decisions, the most dominant and powerful of which was undoubtedly the transport and infrastructure department in what was aptly termed ‘Roads Service’.
The urban motorways were first proposed in the early 1960s, but the Westlink, the only section constructed and cutting through the arterial routes of the west and north of the city, was not started until 1981, and finished two years later. However, the neglect and blight caused by these plans, before a spade had even broken ground, had profound impacts on the working-class communities adjoining the city centre. Families who had rented for generations found landlords unwilling to repair housing that was to be vested and for which the landlords would be compensated. During the late 1960s, industrial decline was causing social stress for the Catholic mill workers in the Falls and Protestant shipyard workers in the Shankill. The violence that erupted in the streets connecting these two areas evolved in this context of housing stress and uncertainty, a factor omitted in most Troubles histories.
lf unrealised in the 1970s, the Westlink plans lent themselves to an increasingly balkanised city of sectors and enclaves. During the early years of the Troubles in the 1970s, a working committee tasked with examining security issues in the city noted ‘the wisdom’ of using the urban motorway and inner ring road projects to create a wide cordon sanitaire to separate the west and north of the city from the commercial core. These were the working-class areas where the effects of the Troubles were most intense…
During the Troubles, general planning policies permitted business and people to relocate to what were seen as safer enclaves in suburbs and towns around the city, essentially facilitating the relocation of the middle class away from the city and increasing the process of social division and sifting. All of these factors led to the ‘bubble’ of car use becoming the predominant and safe method of crossing the city during the conflict. Notably this has a class dimension, since car ownership in poorer inner areas is low, but the middle classes (where car ownership is high) can navigate the city, largely overcoming urban and sectarian obstacles….
Few now remember the way the city was connected, the populations who were moved are scattered and their stories are lost. For a new suburban and commuting generation, the motorway provides easy access to and through the city. This transactional relationship views the city as a utility…
When it comes to the strategic development of the city, the peace walls are largely forgotten. A set of hidden barriers and social-class divisions have unfolded in the last two decades in a process that is washing over the older layers of sectarian division. The city appears to be more divided, not less, despite the superficial appearance of progress. The recovery of the city in recent decades has been very fragmentary. In Brendan Murtagh’s words, a ‘twin speed city’ has emerged whereby favoured areas benefit from investment, while other areas remain unaddressed, the ‘contrast’ in the city has been turned up in peace times. The shatter zones and inapt developments that sully city life create a centre that is isolated, almost an island set within a ring of poor neighbourhoods with decades of unresolved issues, impervious even to gentrification. It is arguably this social division on class grounds that defines how the city is being developed today.
John Duncan’s Boom Town series records Belfast’s transformation since 2002. This image from 2006 depicts Arthur Square, on the dubious cusp of a renaissance
There are signs of change: recent refurbishments are bringing people and bespoke offices into the remaining vacant Victorian buildings. Night life is spreading that is not solely reliant on the evening wave of commuter traffic, or the fleets of taxis depositing and collecting crowds for weekend nights out. Three tracts of major development are driving change at the moment: a new central rail station; the former Sirocco Works to the east; and a new Ulster University campus to the north, an entire university relocating from its suburban campus. The latter brings with it student housing blocks that are adding new residents to the centre. However, all of these developments are piecemeal and missing strategic opportunities to create a wider social and spatial stitching of the urban fabric.
As Belfast is currently engaging on a new urban plan, the first by the actual city authority in more than 75 years, it faces key challenges..
The divisions in the city are less visible and less visibly violent than before, but the current mode of development is manifestly creating a more insidious and deep schism, Belfast is still a city divided.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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