Belfast: a city bent on obliterating its past
Recently, in an idle moment, I joined a Facebook closed group called Images and Memories of Old Northern Ireland Pre 2000. It proved riveting. What I didn’t realise was how deeply affected I would be by evidence of the destruction of Belfast, in particular, not by IRA bombs and civil unrest, but by the planners, property developers and commercial interests.
The Belfast of my early childhood, in the 1950s, looked much as it had 50 years previously. Change was underway. Horses were becoming a rarity. More people had cars – my dad’s was a black Ford Anglia with a gear lever two feet long. The streetlamps in the city centre were being converted from gas to electricity and traffic lights had been installed at major intersections. The old trams, along with their shiny steel tracks, were being withdrawn, to be replaced by trolley buses. Cobbles were giving way to tarmac. There were new buildings, of course, such as Transport House, the colourful northern headquarters of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, complete with murals depicting the dignity of labour, and, nearby, the grey lubyanka that was the new telephone exchange in Cromac Street, just up the road from the Albert Bridge.
But Belfast overall still had the appearance of a Victorian city, and a handsome one at that. Today it is a mess, designed for the car, not the people – though the people might disagree since most of them have cars.
One of the worst examples of the vandalism that was a commonplace between 1960 and the millennium can be seen by comparing old photographs of Donegall Place, the city’s principal shopping thoroughfare with those taken more recently. In my boyhood, this was a fabled street, as grand (in my imagination) as anything in London, Paris or New York. Every building was made of stone. Every one was different, yet they melded together into a seamless arcade of commerce, complete with window displays and canopies that folded down when it rained.
Today, all of the famous stores have gone, either demolished or bowdlerised. The last, known as the Bank Buildings, was consumed by fire two years ago after a renovation that cost £100 million. Primark, which owns the shell, promises it will rebuild and restore, keeping the existing façade with its landmark clock. If so, its conservationist instinct will have been almost unique. The Donegall Place of 2019 is villainously ugly, its degeneration relieved only by the prospect at its northern end of the grandiloquent City Hall, completed in 1906.
Next door to Primark is a brash Tesco Metro occupying what was formerly the city headquarters of the Provincial Bank of Ireland. At a pinch, it could be said that this extravagant building, constructed in the 1860s in the heroic style popular at the time, has become the Galerie Lafayette of Belfast. Sadly, in spite of a brave attempt at conservation, its glamour has departed. Its windows proclaim special offers. Where the polished counters would have been are lines of frozen food and cheap clothing. But we should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies. After all, every little helps.
Belfast – like Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle – strives ever harder to be modern – which is to say, it wants to look as if the past was an embarrassment, best forgotten. Haussmann would be appalled. At least when he cut a swathe through medieval Paris, he knew what he was doing and followed a plan that would give the capital of France its fabled homogeneity.
In Belfast, it was anything goes. If it was old, knock it down. Either that or stick a high street store on its ground floor, made of plastic and glass. Planners in the 1970s and ’80s were about as concerned for the underlying structure of the city as was the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters.
There is an irony at work here. The citizens of Belfast, Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, are notoriously immersed in their past. They cannot forget the injustices done to them not only during the 30 years of the Troubles, but throughout the last 400 years or, in the case of Republicans, all the way back to the Norman invasion in 1169. There is a kind of inverted nostalgia for the awfulness of what took place and a determination that it should never be forgotten.
If only a little of that regard could be applied to the city itself.
Lest you think I am an old fart, liable at the drop of a top hat to describe anything built after 1910 as a monstrous carbuncle, I should add that the planners of the twenty-first century are manifestly a cut above their predecessors. They care about old buildings and old neighbourhoods and have begun to demand of architects and applicants alike that whatever it is they have in mind should be built to last and to provide for Belfast’s 500,000 residents something of which in future they might legitimately be proud.
There a number of examples of this new pride in action, most obviously in the district surrounding the city’s rather splendid St Anne’s Cathedral, consecrated in 1904, built with stone from all four Irish provinces. But there is a lot of ground to make up and mistakes are still being made.
The Waterfront Hall, a multipurpose auditorium overlooking the River Lagan, was widely acclaimed when it opened in 1997. But then they spoiled it by building an extension, straight out of Legoland, that obstructs its view of the river. Elsewhere, Victorian warehouses are still being raised to make way for “luxury” apartments. The good news is that developers have rediscovered the value (in cash terms) of preserving and adapting nineteenth century civic architecture. And at the same time, conservationists are much more active than they used to be. The bad news is that there is so little left to conserve.
Cities are many things. They are, first and foremost, places in which large numbers of people live and work. But they are also at the cutting edge of mass-culture and the physical expression of the way we live today. As monuments to a shared patrimony, they are entitled to both respect and dignity. There is not much respect for the past left in the Belfast of today, and precious little dignity. It is one thing to seek new beginnings. To obliterate the past is something else entirely. The city deserves better.