Tag Archives: Belfast

Belfast – 3: Troubles

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Most cities offer an open-top, hop-on hop-off bus tour. Mostly I can take or leave them. It does make for a particularly useful introduction to Belfast. Much of the city’s fame is steeped in the Troubles, interesting times to be sure. The suburbs featured even more than the city centre. The Falls and the Shankill were the capitals of the troublesome antagonists. There’s something slightly weird being a tourist on an open top bus, cruising through mundane working class residential areas, safe but with a frisson of danger. Perhaps weirder still to be a resident going about your business, yet at any time grabbed in the lens of visitors cameras. Though it could be worse, and once was. A loop through the docklands is also useful, stopping of course outside the Titanic exhibition.

The tour guides each have their own patter, a comedy routine in the making, a mixture of historical details and lurid anecdotes. The latter may be shaggy dog tales, but the history is convincing. We took a couple of jaunts, and so were treated to a variety of routines. Most were racy and jocular, and one who did a drearily hilarious comic turn. 

The first stop was at St George’s Market on May Street, close to the Waterfront. This is an attractive redbrick Victorian Market from the end of the nineteenth century. Enter through the main archway into a hive of trading activity with hundreds of stalls selling books, clothes, art, antiques, hot food and snacks from friday through to sunday. The friday market dates back to the city’s formation in 1604, with fruit and veg, antiques, crafts, clothes and books. Saturday devotes itself to being specifically a food and craft fair, then sunday brings both elements together with live music thrown in. St George’s Market doubles as a music and arts venue with events ranging fron the World Irish Dance Championship to Deep Purple. 

Next door is a pub that honours a singer of my own city, Ronnie Drew. It’s disconcerting to see his face around here, but consoling. Born in Dun Laoghaire in 1934, he founded his own group with Luke Kelly and others. The Dubliners first played in O’Donoghue’s in Dublin’s Merrion Row, a favourite haunt of mine. It’s good to see them commemorated in Ireland’s second city. Ronnie Drew’s is an ornate old style bar from the 1920s, with five large snugs along the huge arched windows at the front. Once called McGettigan’s, it was renamed for Drew following his death in 2008

The next bus takes us via City Hall and on to Great Victoria Street. From the city centre we head into the leafy suburbs of the University Quarter. This quarter includes the Ulster Museum, the Botanic Gerdens and of course Queens University, Belfast. The university was founded in 1845 as an associate college of the Queens University of Ireland, along with Cork and Galway. It was intended to be a learning centre for Catholics and Presbyterians as distinct from the Anglican Trinity College Dublin. Queens is enjoying its summer hiatus at the moment. I recall Freshers week, many moons ago, where the rag mag profiled a hopeful candidate in the student elections. He was running on the surprising platform of a Gay Paisleyite, with the ne’er to be forgotten slogan: Better Gay than Taig. Taig, from the common Gaelic name Tadhg, being the Loyalist slang term for their Nationalist foe.

The main building fronting onto University Road was designed by the English architect Charles Lanyon. It is an impressive gothic redbrick with a central tower inspired by Magdalen College in Oxford. Lanyon also designed the Campanile at Trinity College Dublin and many Belfast landmarks, including the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens nearby, Belfast Castle and Crumlin Road Courthouse and Gaol. Lanyon Place is named in his honour, though the modernist slab of a railway station seems somewhat ironic.

The tour heads west towards the Falls Road, a two mile long thoroughfare heading from the city centre to Andersonstown. The area is home to the Catholic community of West Belfast. We stop at the Bobby Sands mural, one of the most famous of Belfast’s many political murals. It dates from 1998, around the corner of the Falls at Sevastapol Street, on the gable end of the Sinn Fein hq. Sands was sentenced to fourteen years in the H-Block at Long Kesh for possession of a firearm in 1981. He went on hunger strike to campaign for political prisoner status and was elected MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone. After sixty six days he died at the age of twenty seven, in May. A further nine men died before the hunger strike was called off in October. 

Further down the Falls we glimpse Divis Tower, a twenty storey residential block from the sixties. Standing 200 foot tall it was a significant landmark of the Troubles. The British army occupied the top two floors as an observation post, though they could only access it by helicopter. Residents moved back in fifteen years ago.

Turning left off the Falls, a row of murals occupies the Solidarity Wall along Northumberland Street. Alongside national and local heroes, other international revolutionaries favoured by Republicans are commemmorated. These include Palestinian, Basque and South African activists, with Nelson Mandela prominent amongst them.

Through a double gate, we leave the Falls and enter the Shankill area, a Loyalist enclave. Murals now switch to assertions of Britishness with the Union Jack and King Billy (William of Orange) signifying that you’ve crossed the divide. That divide is demarcated by the Peace Wall on Cupar Way. This was erected by the British Army in 1969 to prevent inter community strife between Nationalists and Loyalists. 

There are thirty km of walls in total, in various areas throughout Belfast. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, following the IRA ceasefire of four years earlier, effectively brought an end to hostilities. The Peace Wall could at last live up to its name. The barrier has evolved into an open page for the amateur graffitti artist. A litany of hopes and dreams scribbled by the great unwashed, and the great and the good. National and international leaders have made their mark. Bill Clinton, a significant force in the Peace Process was here. According to our guide he contributed the quote: I never slept with that woman! I doubt it. Ironically, the symbolic importance of the wall has itself become a barrier to taking the thing down. It’s longer now than at the end of the Troubles  

Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s is blue

They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu

Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games

Hiding out in treetops, shouting out rude names

Whistling tunes, we hide in the dunes by the seaside

Whistling tunes, we piss on the goons in the jungle

It’s a knockout

If looks could kill, they probably will

In games without frontiers

War without tears

(Games Without Frontiers is a Peter Gabriel song from his third solo album Peter Gabrel. The title is taken from a Trans European tv show of the sixties and beyond: Jeux Sans Frontiers. That line is sung by Kate Bush as an alternate chorus. British tv used the more combative title: It’s a Knockout.)

We stop along the Shankill Road where the atmosphere is muted and rather grim. I wonder if we should strike up a few verses of We’re on the One Road. But perhaps its message of togetherness might be misconstrued along here. Returning to the city centre, the bus deposits us at Donegall Square and the City Hall.

Our last night on the town brings us to Bittles Bar. Occupying a flatiron wedge at the junction of Victoria Street and Church Lane, it dates from 1868, when it was known as the Shakespeare. The literary theme continues inside the small triangular bar. A great selection of paintings are crammed into every available space with group portraits of Irish literary and sporting heroes enjoying a few pints. There’s a large canvas of Yeats, Behan, Beckett, Wilde and Joyce, while peace era iconography brings together erstwhile combatants of the Troubles, Adams and Paisley sharing a joke. The pub’s most popular poet seems to be Padraic Fiacc who gazes down, not quite benignly, at the bar. A spiky quote: Screeching gulls in a smoky bacon sky, hints at a spiky character. Christened Patrick O’Connor, he was born in Belfast, the son of a barman. His family lived in the Markets area nearby, having been burned out of their home in Lisburn. They moved to New York and Padraic grew up in the notorious Hell’s Kitchen area. A case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. He connected with his Belfast roots in the forties and returned to live here in 1956. A member of Aosdana, he died only recently, in 2019 at the grand age of 95.

Meanwhile, although the night is still young, last orders are called. I had just been extolling the benefits of Belfast in peacetime only to be made aware that we were caught in an unfree state, with antediluvian licensing hours. Ten o’clock on a Sunday night on a Bank Holiday weekend and we’re out on the street.  So it looks like I’m going to wake up in the city that does sleep. However, a stiff, and anxious, walk back to the Titanic quarter, and the wonderful Premier Inn provides a pint of Harp, or two, to take us to the midnight hour.

Belfast – 2: Titanic

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We’re staying in the Titanic Quarter, practically next door to the eponymous attraction. The tall gleaming building is a landmark in itself, embodying in its design a suggestion of the famous liner built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard nearby. Edward James Harland was born in Yorkshire in 1831 and moved to Belfast in 1854 to manage Robert Hickson’s shipyard on Queens Island. In 1858 Harland bought the shipyard from Hickson. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff from Hamburg had worked as Harland’s assistant, and soon was made a partner. Harland and Wolff prosperred, forging a lucrative partnership with the White Star shipping line. White Star exemlified high quality service for the transatlantic passenger trade. The Belfast shipyard became exclusive builders for them, providing ships on an ever more grandiose scale, culminating in the Titanic in 1912.

The decline of Belfast shipbuilding saw Queens Island left derelict. A handful of structures were listed for preservation, including the Titanic slipway and the iconic Samson and Goliath gantry cranes. These were only built in 1969 and 74, and are still in use as part of the dry dock operations of the yard. The Titanic Quarter development was proposed in the mid nineties. The Odyssey Complex was an early development which opened in the new millennnium. The Arena hosts the Belfast Giants hockey team, and is also a venue for music gigs. The Premier Inn, our hosts, was the first hotel opened here in 2010. 

The Titanic Belfast visitor attraction was proposed as a focus for the site. It was intended to emulate Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao as a prestige scheme which would inspire a regeneration of the area itself and the wider city. Overseeing the project, Dublin firm Harcourt Developments enlisted American architect Eric Kuhne and London firm Event Communications. The building echoes the outline of the huge White Star ships, standing as high as the Titanic hull on completion. Locals have given the nickname the Iceberg. The silver sheen of the building comes from its aluminium cladding, whose jagged finish also isuggest ice crystals. The visitor centre stands on the slipway where the Titanic was launched.

The Titanic Experience will take a few hours. It first immerses the visitor in the rapidly growing nineteenth century city of Belfast, then takes you from the ship’s conception, through gestation and birth, and on to that fateful voyage, and beyond. It is a story of dockland and street, nuts and bolts, the savage vastness and caprices of the sea, and of course people. The people who designed her, who toiled to make her, who were charged with sailing her, who paid to sail in her, who survived or perished, as the die would have it.

Titanic is the most famous ship ever, though it never completed its maiden voyage. Carrying 2,224 passengers and crew, she set off from Southampton to New York by way of Cherbourg and Cobh, then known as Queenstown. Hopes would have been high. Here was a voyage into a new world, upon the greatest ship afloat, proclaimed unsinkable with the best in modern safety technology. Allegedly. Third Class were better catered for by White Star than they would have been elsewhere, with cabins instead of open dormitories, their own dining rooms, a smoking room, reading room and an assembly hall. Facilities in first class were luxurious, based on the quality of the Ritz, with restaurants, gymnasium and turkish baths, A glorious Grand Staircase swept up through seven decks topped by a metal and glass dome.

She sank on 15th April 1912 off the coast of Newfoundland. Capt Edward Smith went down with the ship. One thousand five hundred people died. The names of all the dead are displayed on a huge wall as we begin our descent from the exhibition’s top floor. Stories abound, ranging from modest steerage to those of great wealth and fame. There was the unsinkable Molly Brown, who survived. Born Margaret Tobin in 1867 to Irish immigrants in Missouri. She moved to Leadville, Colorado, in her teens and married mining engineer James Brown who became wealthy through his work. A wealthy socialite, Margaret didn’t forget her poor background, and applied herself to philanthropy in the cause of women and workers. Her survival became the stuff of legend and led to her posthumous nickname

Fate smiled on others who either missed the boat or got off. Amongst those who disembarked at Cobh was Fr Francis Browne, an Irish Jesuit and photographer. He received a first class ticket from Southampton to Cobh as a gift from his uncle. On board he befriended a rich American couple who offered to pay his passage to New York. He telegraphed the bishop and the reply was swift, and negative: Get off that ship! Browne studied at Dublin’s University College with James Joyce who remembered him with a walk on part in Finnegans Wake. Even more unsinkable than his namesake Molly, he was a chaplain in the Great War and survived the Battle of the Somme, Passchandaele and many other fierce battles. Wounded five times, he was awarded the Military Cross and the Crois de Guerre. The survival of Browne’s photographs form an enduring legacy of life in the twentieth century. His photographs chronicle life in Ireland and abroad, while his record of the Titanic, its passengers and crew before their date with fate, is invaluable.

Nearing the end, with the weight of the dead above us, we descend to the depths. The Titanic rested undisturbed for more than seventy years. In 1985 Robert Ballard and Jean Luis Michel found the wreck. Celebration was spontaneous, though Ballard quickly saw the problem of joy in what was, is in effect a mass graveyard. A film by James Cameron in 1997 featured Leonardo de Caprio, a steerage passenger forging a love affair with Kate Winslet. Their celebration of life at the ship’s prow gives a photoshoot moment for visitors seeking to recreate the moment starring themselves. My companions oblige, though I must draw a veil over that.

After the full emotional experience of the Titanic spend some time on the Nomadic, parked adjacent to the visitor centre and included in the admission. The Nomadic is the Titanic in miniature. It was used as a ferry for passengers from the dockside to the Titanic anchored offshore. The interior is lovingly preserved, with some ghostly projections taking us back to the days. 

After all of that, it was time to sink a few cold ones. There are few oases this side of the Lagan. It’s a ten minute hike across a selection of bridges to the city centre. We took the Lagan Weir Bridge which curves to the west bank where it is guarded by the Big Fish. This sculpture by John Kindness was commissioned at the end of the last century as part of the urban regeneration along the riverbank. The fish is clad in ceramic scales, many with texts and images illustrating the city’s history. Aptly, it stands at the confluence of the Farset and Lagan rivers.

The Farset is the river that gave Belfast its name: the mouth of the Farset, Beal Feirste in Gaelic. The original settlement was here, and a small dockland grew up. This was covered over in the eighteenth century and is now Queen’s Square.  The buildings on the south side of the square would once have faced the quayside of the old town dock. The oldest building in Belfast survives here, and houses McHugh’s Bar. It was built as a private residence in 1711 and by the following decade a public house was in operation. McHugh’s serves food and drink and there are lively evening music sessions. Its large outdoor terrace facing the square was perfect for a perfectly sunny day. Our own trio was augmented by a trio of friendly locals and we fell into the heaven of lively conversation and chilled beer in the afternoon sun.

The Albert Memorial Clock dominates the square. Built to honour the Queen’s Consort who died in 1861, it is Belfast’s very own leaning tower. Being built on land reclaimed from the River it leans four feet off the vertical and stands, if precariously, over a hundred feet tall. It was once a haunt of prostitutes. Perhaps it was a form of sympathetic magic, or just that they, like the tower, had the time and the inclination.

The area has moved upmarket in recent times. The Cathedral Quarter is named for St Anne’s Cathedral nearby. Once a warehouse zone this warren of cobblestone lanes is the go to area for city nightlife. Such colourful names as the Thirsty Goat, the Cloth Ear, the Chubby Cherub and Bunsen Burgers clamour for your drinking and dining pleasure. We wander for a time in the summer haze of evening through a long narrow laneway beneath neon umbrellas with a caption saying there’s only seven types of rain in Belfast, all seven days a week. But not this weekend.

Belfast – 1

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Belfast is Ireland’s second city, and the capital of Northern Ireland. It is a two hour train ride from Dublin Connolly on the Enterprise; all going well. I was last here just over ten years ago, taking another jaunt north with my younger son to see the Belfast Giants ice hockey team at the Odyssey Arena. Images of the frozen north were amplified within the confines of the ice rink, and in truth were not dispelled in the great outdoors; but this time Belfast was caught in the embrace of a big blue sky, and it was sweltering.

I went up with two friends and we booked into the Premier Inn for two nights. It’s just across the Lagan river in the Titanic Quarter, a new development growing around the dockside and the famous shipyards, and adjacent to the Odyssey Complex. Technically, we’re staying in County Down, and this will be the first time I’ve overnighted in that particular county. Most of Belfast is in County Antrim.

As it turned out, the Enterprise didn’t boldly go where it was supposed to, instead depositing us at Lisburn, nine miles short. The rail service put on a few busses to ferry us into the city. It was a cheerful, if cramped half hour, us southern sardines standing and swaying as the cheerful driver kept his foot to the floor and an entertaining patter going with those of us nearby. He delivered us to the terminal on Great Victoria Street on the west side of the city centre.

We first put into The Crown Liquor Saloon, it being on our hit list and also being the first pub we saw. Travelling on a hot day is thirsty work. Originally this was called the Railway Tavern for the principal Railway station across the road. The first station was built in 1848 in the first flowering of Irish railroads. Glory days are made to pass and it was closed in 1971, and demolished to make way for a modern block. A new station openend in 1995 adjoining the Great Northern Mall shopping centre. The name Great Northern here alludes to the Great Northern Railway which absorbed the original Ulster Railway of 1838. 

Meanwhile, the pub was renovated and renamed the Crown in 1885. It was conceived as a Victorian gin palace, as the lavishly ornate bars of the era were known. Publican Patrick Flanagan employed Italian craftsmen who were engaged in the construction of Catholic churches, enjoying a boom in Belfast at that time. The Italians certainly stamped the Crown with their exuberance. The colourful tiled exterior is eye catching and the effect continues in the glowing interior, also decorated with tiles and illuminated by gas lamps. Stained glass partitions separate a total of ten snugs with original antique fittings. So it was that we three amigos collapsed into the Crown and took possession of a snug.

Belfast city centre is laid out in grid form indicating its relatively modern conception. Its population stands at 350,000 in the urban area, with 650,000 in the wider metropolitan area. Yet two hundred years ago the city population was barely a tenth of that. It may have had a castle in Norman times, but the largest castle of note in the vicinity was Carrickfergus, still is, ten miles north on the shores of the Lough. Carrickfergus was essentially the capital of Ulster since 1177 when John De Courcy established Norman power there shortly after Strongbow’s invasion and Henry II’s assertion of overlordship. English power was stalled by Edward de Bruce’s campaign in the fourteenth century. Edward was the brother of Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, and was himself proclaimed King of Ireland in 1315. He captured Carrickfergus but three years later he was defeated and slain by Anglo Irish forces at the Battle of Faughart, near Dundalk. Edward’s reign was brief, and rarely extended past Ulster, but English rule remained stalled for a further three centuries. 

It wasn’t until 1615 that Sir Arthur Chichester founded Belfast as a town. Belfast Castle was established, built on the ruling O’Neill’s tower house and becoming a focal point as the Plantation of Ulster took off. That castle burnt down a century later. The current Belfast Castle is physically remote from the ancient castle which fell into ruin and then oblivion. It was built in 1870 on the Donegall family’s deerpark on the outskirts of Belfast at Cave Hill. It is actually a grand Victorian residence, in the Scots Baronial style, though in the hands of Belfast City Council for the last century and is open to the public and may also be booked for events and weddings. 

English, Manx and Huguentot settlers predominated in the early colonisation of Belfast. It was the Huguenots and Scottish Presbyterians who introduced the linen trade which fuelled the increasing growth of the town. Through the 19th century, Belfast establsihed itself as one of the major linen producers in the world and acquired the nickname Linenopolis. Try saying that after a few jars.

Our cross city navigation was easy enough. Great Victoria Street is a busy thoroughfare lined by tall buildings running north south and defining the western edge of the city centre. Next door to the station is the Europa Hotel, once dubbed the most bombed hotel in world, having suffered  thirty six bomb attacks during the Troubles; being the conflict in Norrthern Ireland that lasted for thirty years until 1998. Yet the Europa endures. It was built on the site of the original railway station and was the popular haunt for journalists in those troubled times. Today the twelve stoey tower is a four star luxury hotel with two hundred and seventy bedrooms, and promises a quiet night’s sleep. 

Adjacent is the Grand Opera House. This opened in 1895 with a thousand seater auditorium hosting variety shows and musicals. Over the years performers have included Sarah Bernhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Orson Welles and Luciano Pavarotti. The onset of the Troubles saw a decline in fortunes and developers wanted to pull it down. Sense prevailed, and the building was bought by the Arts Council and listed in 1974. A recent refurbishment has restored the plush ambience of its glory days. Theatre tours can be booked and the upcoming programme includes a heady mix of musical entertsinment, with Oliver, the Rocky Horror Show and the Buddy Holly Story on the bill.

At right angles, the parallel avenues of Chichester Street and May Street head due east, reaching the Lagan River and Belfast Lough just beyond another Victoria Street, which must cause some confusion. Mind you, there is something of an obsession with that particular monarch hereabouts, so inextricably is the city linked to the Victorian age.

Either route takes us through the busy commercial centre of Belfast, and midway along we find City Hall. Belfast City Hall does what a city hall should, providing the centre point and pivotal landmark for the city it serves. It was conceived in 1888 when Belfast, at last, was granted city status by the Queen, Queen Victoria of course. From a population of only twenty thousand in 1800 it was the largest city in Ireland by then, passing the three hundred thousand mark, so it was not before time that it was recognised as a city. 

The City Hall and grounds occupies Donegall Square, named in honour of the Chichester family, founders of the city. Arthur Chichester was made Earl of Donegall in 1647 and the family castle once stood nearby. The county itself is now spelt with one l: Donegal. The building was designed by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, an English architect. Completed in 1906 it is faced in white Portland stone, a shining palace in Neo Baroque style. There are echoes of the phanthom fortress long gone, with a tower in each corner and a soaring copper dome capping the centrepiece column. The grounds are strewn with monuments to Queen Victoria (again), Edward James Harland of shipyards fame and those who sailed on the Titanic. There is also the Garden of Remembrance and Cenotaph. The extensive lawns accomodate the public. They are out in force on this most glorious of days, but can relax here on any day, to take the sunsine and forget such cares that life, and history can bring.