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 The old trams, along with their shiny steel tracks, were being withdrawn, to be replaced by trolley buses.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.
