Cartography , The City. Belfast 2000

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a catalyst arts projec

CART og rA PHY:THe CITY

november 2ooo

BElfast was a maze to get lost in CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY o1

a catalyst arts projec

CART og rA PHY:THe CITY

november 2ooo

Prior TO THE INVENTIoN oF PowErED FLIGHT, EArLY CARToGRAPHY wAS CoNSTRUCTED FroM aTERRESTrIAL PERSPECTIVE, aUGMENTED BY orAL AND MATErIAL DEVICES. THIS ACT oF MAPPING wAS INTIMATELY CONNECTED TO THE SCALE AND EXPERIENCE oF THE BODY wITH ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE EARTH. THE RESULTANT MAP wAS THE SPECULATION oF AN AErIAL, CELESTIAL PoINT oF VIEw THAT EMBoDIED MYTHICAL AND TELLURIC EXPERIENCE; THE MAP AND THE EXPERIENCE BEING ONE. THE ADVENT oF AERIAL PHoToGRAPHY CHANGED oUr PERSPECTIVE OF THE LANDSCAPE, SHIFTING CARToGrAPHIC AND CULTUrAL CoDES. MAPS BECAME EXTERNALISED, MEDIATED, DEVICES THAT DEVELOPED A ProSTHETIC rELATIoNSHIP wITH BoDY AND LANDSCAPE.

IN THIS EVENT MAP AND EXPErIENCE BECAME DISLoCATED. anne BoDdingtoN.

The focus of the project; something which relocates and reworks these notions of contemporary cartography as a detached, remote discipline into an open medium for the experience and analysis of The City’s constantly shifting physical, social and psychological landscape. Cartography and cognitive mapping acting as the centrefugal approaches by participants to the project. In an attempt to navigate and integrate a number of disparate practices which sometimes operate within their own professional stylistic agendas ,and acknowledging the need for a more complex, inclusive approach.

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uneven economic and geographical development is a structural, rather than incidental feature of present expansion- since space is produced by and reproduces social relations.

Rosalyn Deutsche.’The power of the City’ Catalogue. Whitney Museam of Modern Art.

the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions to the urban totality in which they find themselves....

Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.

Fredrick Jameson.

Belfast in these terms may be considered an urban environment where a sense of place, orientation and knowledge of the urban landscape was essential in moving between a series of alienated territories. Acknowledging the history of Belfasts’ fractured physical landscape. It is hoped that these perspectives are recognised and bleed into the present debates of disjointed redevelopment and socio- political change. In doing so we hope the project also develops a more reflective approach to these spatial concerns.

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Contents o4 o6 o8 1o 12 16 17 18 2o 24 26 28 3o 31 32 33

Editor and Co-ordinator

Stephen Hackett

Exhibition Organisation

Allan Hughes

Project Assistants

Publication Design

Eoghan McTigue

Belfast 1:1 Albertbridge Road ‘New Languages Would Have to be Invented’

Aaron Kelly

Map of the City

Victoria Hall Robert Bertoia

Quatre Cartes Belfast - An Invisible Electromagnetic Anomaly A Collection of Statements BoomTown Pedestrian Mitte Berlin/Café Germania The Urban Dialectics of Belfast Scopo About Town

Richard West Jo Roberts John Duncan Phil Collins Jochen Becker Dr Eamonn Hughes Daniel Jewesbury Aisling O’Beirn

Talks Programme Newtown High Noon Belfast, August 1969

Pat Naldi From the Duchas Project

Ursula Burke John Matthews Phil Collins Clive Murphy Elina Medley Fiona Ní Mhaoilir Keith Connolly

Special Thanks to : Aaron Kelly (Proofreading), Falls Community Council, Claire Hackett, Architectural Association of Ireland, Linen Hall Library, Cormac Reilly (Housing Executive), Derek Reay (Geological Survey of N.I), Central Library.

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‘New Languages Would Have to be Invented’: Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man. Aaron Kelly The Queen’s University of Belfast

This essay examines Resurrection Man in the context of the delimitation of urban space in the “Troubles” thriller, which has become the dominant fictional mode of representing Northern Ireland over the last thirty years. This representational hegemony has habituated the thriller as proffering an appropriate form for national and historical experience in the North. I wish to undercut this representational conjuncture whereby the enduring confrontations, conspiracies and mysteries of the thriller form augment dominant sociopolitical and cultural views of the North as being itself historically suspended in a perpetual stasis. In terms of urban space, then, this account of a cyclical, iterative conflict between two tribal monoliths is literally made concrete in an immutable sectarian geography of Belfast ghettoes and one-way systems. By way of illustration, Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence depicts Belfast as comprising ‘graffiti-fouled barricaded slums where the city’s Protestant and Catholic poor confronted each other, year in year out, in a stasis of hatred, fear and mistrust’ (21). One on level, this eschewal of both human agency and historical process attests to a representational hegemony, through which Irish historical agents are written out of their own historical moment, propitiously theorized by Joep Leerssen’s formulation of auto-exoticism, in which ‘Ireland is made exotic by the self-same descriptions which purport to represent or explain Ireland’ (37). The discursive sedimentations established by the international thriller market, which largely bases thrills on its exoticization of the North as a dangerous anyplace, representationally eviscerate Belfast as inert void.

For example, Gerald Seymour’s Harry’s Game describes Belfast as ‘the adventure playground par excellence for the urban terrorist’ (31), a terrain of sheer otherness to be deciphered and controlled. From such a perspective, the thriller’s criminalization of urban illegibility wills the reconstitution of Williams’ ‘knowable community’ in a thoroughly depleted form. For the homogeneous otherness, through which urban space is portioned in these terms, substitutes the community as either known or knowable for that which is controllable or regulatable. In short, a fixed relation of place and belonging here rests on the detectable or decipherable community. However, this anxious, historically voided portrayal of Belfast, I shall argue, also bespeaks the pastoralism of the dominant ideologies in Ireland.

Therefore, in examining the mechanics of exoticism producing representations of Belfast in the “Troubles” thriller, this essay also addresses the problematics of representing the city for the dominant ideologies in Ireland more generally. Urban space threatens the social cartographies and spatial visions of Irish Nationalism and Unionism, both of which I shall deem rusticative ideologies: which is to say, ideologies entrapped in an orientation towards a rural idealism. By this I mean that Irish Nationalism and Unionism literally ground themselves on a pastoral conservatism which has profound implications for the representation of place and social relations in Irish culture. Both are fundamentally ‘filiative’(20), to employ Edward Said’s term, ideologies. That is, they base their continuity and hegemony on the organic and essentialist as a seamless and naturalized reproduction of order, authority and identity, for which the family is a paradigmatic organizational unit. Think, for instance, of Seamus Heaney’s parish, which is structured around the father as a readily politicized terrain often standing metonymically for the nation, in which language, self and place mythically cohere beyond the requisitions of History. I shall return for a moment to Moore’s ‘graffiti-fouled barricaded slums’. In many ways, the graffiti indelibly etched as demarcatory totem on the walls of these static enclaves offers itself as an attempt to recapitulate the conventional assemblage of language, place and identity in Irish culture. This fixed signification and wholeness is structurally incompatible with, and fundamentally denaturalized by, the thriller form itself. The thriller emerged historically as a response to breakdown of precisely such organicism under pressure of modernity and urbanity, as an attempt to chart and resolve the anonymous, disconnective signs and riddles of the city.

The polysemous fabric of urban space, its implication in historical process, disrupts the seamlessly homogeneous linguistic and communal attachment of Irish Nationalism and Unionism. The city as contestatory, imaginative terrain is the opposite of the closed system of the nation. The city is in itself an alternative narrative, or producer and repository of transgressive narratives and histories, to the nation and its fugitive pastoralism. The fearful recoil from the urban and its disruptive potentialities by both Nationalism and Unionism perhaps helps explain the recurrent gothicization of Belfast in contemporary fiction. As Eamonn Hughes posits: ‘the city is ... a form of hell for ideologies which promote a tribalistic knowing your place as the only way of knowing yourself’ (153-154). Thus, Belfast is ultimately an infernal symbolic death for

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precisely these increasingly untenable organic ideologies.

In consequence, it is unsurprising that, as Raymond Williams notes, the city in literature recurrently provides a landscape for various forms of social pessimism (241). This pessimism is to be understood therefore not merely as about society itself but rather self-referentially as about the tenability of the subject ideology configuring such a discourse. In the thriller “Belfast” often functions the malevolent signifier for this pessimism, providing a name for the most reactionary attitudes to the working class, to women, to race, to social otherness. This “Belfast” offers a refuge for the most insipid forms of contempt for human agency and struggle displayed not only by the international thriller’s fascination with a recidivist Irishness but also by the perspectives of Irish Nationalism and Unionism. It is strictly this form of dominant infernalization with which I wish to take issue. For to undercut this representation of Belfast as Hell is not to deny that the city is the site and catalogue of social inequalities, oppressions and deprivations. As Walter Benjamin observes: ‘[t]o determine the totality of forces in which ... modernity imprints itself would mean to represent hell’ (1972-89, V, 1011). The radical, utopian function of crime fiction’s detailing of city space as covert networks of crime in many ways seeks the drafting of just such a Benjaminian map of hell. Rather it is the hell of the lost bearings of a contemptuous social pessimism that I intend to destabilize. Under such representational conditions, Belfast is never itself as a historically complex place; it is perversely a home for its own dislocation. Belfast’s streets, voided of human agents or socio-economic relations and forces, become the arterial occlusions of a terminally-afflicted heart of darkness, its architecture projects the sepulchral, neural landscape of its inhabitants’ monumental psychopathologies. Thus for the serial killer, Candelstick, in Chris Petit’s The Psalm Killer, ‘Belfast was a maze to get lost in, where the darkest deeds stayed secret’ (65).

Possibly, therefore, the character of McClure and his manipulative, clandestine roles in Resurrection Man yields a self-referential appraisal of the more reactionary thriller’s provision of its terrible thrills in an urban cartography of social pessimism and exotically fearful allure: Fitting himself to the secret fear, the hidden desire. Victor had seen him change his character four or five times a day, moving through a series of cold and dexterous personalities. McClure realized that people needed to confide those dangerous thoughts. They had to have a companion to guide them through the strange architecture of their loathing, someone to share its lonely grace (McNamee, 99).

Given the urban displacement of the national narrative, which prompts the rusticative ideological mechanics that I have attempted to outline, the thriller does seemingly offer a literary mode for such confounded ideologies to attempt cognitively to trace the labyrinthine complexity of the city. For the thriller developed historically in its hardboiled American form as a means of mapping and negotiating the modern, urban wilderness, wherein previous ideological co-ordinates and social bearings diffused and vanished. As Raymond Williams notes ‘the opaque complexity of modern city life is represented by crime’ (227). In the capable hands of a writer such as Dashiell Hammett, the thriller becomes a radical form, wherein crime functions a connective fabric through which an otherwise increasingly meaningless and shadowy society may be not only mapped, but also investigated and judged. The genre is also, however, the preserve of writers such as Mickey Spillane, intimating that its form is a dialectical terrain whose social symbolism emits often contradictory ideological signals. For Spillane, crime is not a cognitive means of charting the city as a map of the corruption of capitalism and modernity, but rather structures a rather more reactionary, paranoid terrain in which the city houses an illegible otherness (whether class, gender, or racial) which must be revealed and regulated. It is unfortunately this latter, more reactionary form which has tended to predominate in the “Troubles” thriller, due to the exoticism of the international thriller’s gaze and the tribal production of place, self and other in Ireland itself.

Eoin McNamee’s controversial Resurrection Man is a vastly significant text in considering the representation of Belfast in the thriller, in that it performs both stylistically and formally the transgression of filiative, tribal cartographies within the urban context even as it indulges them. In demonstrating how Resurrection Man decenters the sectarian mortification of Belfast, it is significant that the putatively Catholic name of the character of Victor Kelly, based on the Shankill Butcher, Hugh

Leonard Murphy, is itself a displacement, a hybrid, unsettled signification that contradicts the sectarian and linguistic absolutes that he represents in the text. Victor Kelly’s imaginative attempt to make ‘the city become a diagram of violence centred about him’ (11) in many respects foregrounds and attempts to actuate the representational delimitation of the conventional thriller and its negation of urban consciousness and agency.

The Resurrection Men murders are an attempt to extirpate what Donatella Mazzoleni deems the ‘total aesthetic’ (297) of urban experience, through which the simulacra and sensory apparatus of human agents attempt to produce a sense of place.

As they patrol the environs of west and north Belfast in their car removing unwitting pedestrians from the streets, the Resurrection Men, in addition to foregrounding the representational violence of the tribal map in the thriller, allegorize the urban planning strategies of the area, the role of the misnomic Westlink and the systematic ghettoization of working-class communities. Therefore, on one level Resurrection Man does recapitulate the immutable sectarian geography dissecting Belfast as carcased specimen: ‘the city in all its history devised as a study of death’ (158). It also, however, conveys how the city defeats the imposition of such a tribal cartography, setting it apart from the more reactionary thriller’s criminalized zones of otherness and indicating the more utopian social symbolism embedded in the contestatory form of the thriller. For Victor Kelly’s ‘inventory of the city, a naming of parts’ (27) ultimately breaks down under strain of change and historical process: sometimes on one of these runs he would say, where are we? He sounded surprised as if he had suddenly discovered that the streets were not the simple things he had taken them for, a network to be easily memorized and navigated. They had become untrustworthy, concerned with unfamiliar destinations, no longer adaptable to your own purposes. He read the street names from signs. India Street, Palestine Street. When he spoke them they felt weighty and ponderous on his tongue, impervious syllables that yielded neither direction nor meaning. Sandy Row, Gresham Street ... he would attempt to sketch portions of the city, working fast and silent, streets discarded, corrected, gone over again and again until they yielded up names, faces. Each one seemed incomplete (163).

The incompleteness of his tribal mappings of place is important as it signals the inability of this sectarian cartography to articulate the city as a total aesthetic of distinctive, pyschogeographical territories. It suggests, to quote the novel itself, ‘something beyond the capacity of maps’ (13), something beyond this static tribal cartography in the thriller. This static sectarian geography is typified by Harry’s Game, wherein the British Intelligence services show the eponymous agent Harry Brown a ‘tribal map’ (50) which he must memorize in order to ensure his survival. Often thriller writers themselves seem to adopt this approach and their many errors and misspellings in depicting the various one-way systems and ghettoes, which they supposedly know so well, finally attest to Ciaran Carson’s censure in Belfast Confetti: ‘No, don’t trust maps, for they avoid the moment’ (43).

Kelly’s incomplete tribal map exists in formal tension in the text with a more conspiratorial mapping that ultimately subsumes the former. Many of the characters, not least Victor himself, find themselves working to ‘a hidden imperative’ (197), their lives imbued with ‘unknown resonances’ (150). What is the significance of this conspiratorial mapping? Walter Benjamin commented that ‘the original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd’ (1973, 43). Whilst this riddle of the self is still relevant to the individual’s relation to the city and crime fiction, its co-ordinates have been subsumed in the conspiratorial mapping by the sense that, in the words of Fredric Jameson, ‘it is a society as a whole that is the mystery to be solved’ (1992, 39). Conspiracy, therefore, functions in however degraded a form as a utopian mode, offering a class allegory that seeks to arrange the totality of social forces into a (criminalised) pattern. The conspiracy largely focuses around the figure of McClure and ultimately entails a network of paramilitary figures, police officers and state officials. Thus, when the text depicts Belfast as the ‘scene of a great crime in the hearts of men’ (92) it does recapitulate a more regressive notion of Belfast as fallen city, as a malign architectural projection of the inner landscapes of loathing of its depraved inhabitants. But at

another level of the text’s formulations, that of the conspiratorial mapping, it also functions in a utopian manner in gesturing by means of criminal pattern to the urban totality itself, its social relations, the dialectic of its inequalities and potentialities, its fragmentation and affiliation.

Thus the lines of desire, to employ an urban planning term, encoded in the conspiratorial thriller’s mapping of urban crime as a guide to the urban totality parallels Frederic Jameson’s concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Therein the symbolic geography of the individual’s attempt to reconcile their urban displacement with a sense of the city as total network is extrapolated to our contemplation of the social structure itself. The utopian function of the tracing of crime in the thriller thus coalesces political and urban cartographies, so that cognitive mapping acts not only as the code word but also the methodology of class consciousness itself: the dialectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality ... presents something like a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great formulation of ideology itself ... this positive conception of ideology as a necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated (1988, 353).

Finally, therefore, the subsumption of Victor Kelly’s tribal map by the cognitive map of those shadowy figures who control him intimates the political function of such cognitive attenuation. Kelly’s character indicates that such tribalism is not reducible to the organic persistence of the atavistic in Irish culture but is rather more ultimately determined by a global, late capitalist regulation of city space. The current critical vogue celebrates a new postmodern Belfast fiction, such as Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street, which has supposedly transcended the degraded and gothicized representations of the 1970s and 1980s. However, the spatial politics of Resurrection Man permits the following reformulation: the postmodern Belfast is in fact a postmortem Belfast. That is, the new postmodern Everycity is not the solution to the previous two decades of hellish depictions but is rather its aim, the final banishment from its cognitive purview of the mortified stasis projected upon and ethically interred in the working class. The postmodern ordering of city space is the apotheosis of a representational hegemony, the delimitative function of which, particularly in late capitalism and its tribalization of the working class, seeks to disable a perceptual grasp of the city as a totality of social relations.

WORKS CITED Benjamin, Walter.

Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: New Left Books, 1973.

Gesammelte Schriften. 7 Vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaueser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,1972-89.

Carson, Ciaran.

Belfast Confetti. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990.

Hughes, Eamonn. “‘Town of Shadows’: Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction”.

Religion and Literature Vol.28, No.2-3. Summer / Autumn 1996. 141-160.

Jameson, Fredric.

“Cognitive Mapping” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Greenberg, eds.

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-360.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. London: BFI Publishing, 1992.

Leerssen, Joep.

Remembrance and Imagination : Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork U P, 1996.

Mazzoleni, Donatella. “The City and the Imaginary”. Trans. John Koumantarakis. In Erica Carter et al, eds. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 285-301.

McNamee, Eoin.

Resurrection Man. London: Picador, 1994.

Moore, Brian.

Lies of Silence. London: Vintage, 1992.

Petit, Chris.

The Psalm Killer. London: MacMillan, 1996.

Said, Edward.

The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber, 1984.

Seymour, Gerald.

Harry’s Game. Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1975.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

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This map was achieved via an audio tour from Belfast City Bus Tours. Whilst listening to the tour I sat down to drawn out a visual representation of the city in the form of a Mind Map, noting the points of interest which are acknowledged in the tour. As I was not actually present in the bus, I do not have a sense of when the bus has turned or halted, so many of the monuments appear in the wrong location.

Map of the City November 2000

In the second version symbols have been used as visual representation for points of interest on the tour. Many of the symbols used are associated with tourism signs.

This brings forward two main points, firstly the points of interest which are considered important and secondly the aim of making the viewer look closely by rearranging their familiar surroundings. This creates a sense of confusion that one associates when trying to understand directions in a unfamiliar place.

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BELFaST AN INVISIBLE ELECTROMAGNETIC ANOMaLY Richard West

It is important to equip yourself with a map; not merely to find your way around but to give yourself some indication of the places you can explore. If possible it is a good idea to attach this map to a wall so you will be drawn to it when you are idle. Its many charted yet unknown parts may tempt you to mount your bicycle in a spirit of adventure, where you would otherwise keep company with your television or beer bottle. In this way you might come to experience the view from the top of the Crumlin road or the Monagh by-pass, things you would not normally expect to meet in the run of life.

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aps, in common with anatomical drawings, are remarkable for the unflinching empirical observation that produces them. They are also little like their subject in appearance. The difference between an aerial photograph and a map is similar to that between an anatomical drawing and a corpse. In both cases we may be fascinated by the subject but we look to the map or drawing to make it comprehensible. When we see a map that covers where we live we try to pick out our own individual corpuscle in the weave of the city’s capillaries. There are also as many different potential maps of the city, its geology or road networks etc., as there are drawings of the body, its skeleton and vascular system. In the case of the city however, we do not see any violence in its dissection, as if a city is best represented as it was created, in segments and layers.

My interest in maps of Belfast is in the variety of ways the city has been shown and the uses to which these maps are put. Although a large proportion of the city’s population will own a Belfast map they will mostly be of its roads, perhaps the Bartholomew Streetfinder (the most soulless representation of the city ever produced?) but there must be other kinds of map; of the city’s plants, animals, the mores of its inhabitants; and these are what I have tried to discover.

It is easy to imagine that the most common maps of Belfast portray its sectarian geography but in fact the most frequently encountered map of the city is the Ordnance Survey map and the many other maps derived from it. When I first started looking for maps of the city I tried to find maps in newspapers published outside Belfast imagining there would be an equivalent to the photographs of rioters and Orangemen. These proved difficult to find and more often than not merely explained that the city was located to the North of Ireland (an island to the West of Britain). Sectarian geography is not very often shown in maps except, I assume, for visitors that take a special interest in the subject, such as the army. This seems a paradox because a mental map of the sectarian plan of the city is well known by the population, and its finer points are often discussed, yet it is not written down.

Central Library has catalogues of Belfast maps going back to when the city’s streets could have been sketched on the back of a postcard. After the 1832 publication of the Ordnance Survey map of the city, the variety of maps published declines as the Ordnance Survey becomes ever more definitive. Small tourist maps and maps published in books advertise that they are derived from the latest Ordnance Survey map as a guarantee of their accuracy. The Ordnance Survey has become the measure of all things.

Today the most detailed map of Belfast is the 1:1250 O.S. map which fits the city onto 512 sheets (at £43 each). At less detail there is a 1:10,000, a 1:12,000 and a 1:50,000, at which scale the city is ‘a blob with roads running through it’ (their description). The most detailed map is continually revised and offers that most attractive of features, property boundaries, which is presumably the principle reason for the Survey’s existence; as a record and guarantor of property rights. It is, after all, a government agency. The larger scale maps also contain some of this detail but are principally for those wishing to get from A to B. Similarly those road maps derived from the Ordnance Survey are principally for those wishing to navigate the city.

The most widely available map of the city is the Bartholomew Belfast Streetfinder.

This map, again derived from an O.S. original, is remarkable for its omissions that say much about how we now relate to the city and who the publishers expect to buy their

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product. Unlike its O.S. model the Bartholomew shows almost none of the city’s physical geography, presumably because the difference between landfill sites and meadows is not useful to motorists. There is also no indication of when roads go uphill or downhill.

Houses are not indicated, only the streets on which they are found. Routes which are not taken by cars such as paths in parks or runways are marked by a dotted line and finally, such public buildings as are shown on the map - cathedrals, police stations, galleries and schools - have to vie with car parks to be picked out as of special interest.

The contrast between this map and its 1879 equivalent could not be more marked. Marcus Ward’s shilling map of Belfast, reduced from the 60 inch Ordnance Survey and carefully corrected up until 1879, contains all manner of detail, from the layout of the gardens behind the ‘District Lunatic Asylum’ to the skating rink on Camden street. The Bartholomew map is very coy about army installations and the layout of government buildings, not so in 1879 when the panoptican plan of the jail on the Crumlin road is plainly visible. Your shilling also allowed you to see the world represented in full colour rather than the miserly two colours of the Bartholomew map.

The search for interesting alternative maps of the city never goes very far from the Ordnance Survey. Geological maps produced by the Geological survey of Northern Ireland (GSNI) use an O.S. template even when recording electromagnetic anomalies across Northern Ireland. This map is produced by a low flying aircraft with a magnetometer and records slight anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field. This in turn is read as an indication of the geology below the surface. The aircraft, flying over Belfast, will pick up anomalies resulting from power lines which have to be calculated out as ‘cultural’ distortions. The city therefore has to be rendered invisible for the geology to be accurately represented.

Other maps produced by GSNI, such as those for engineers showing the geology immediately beneath the surface, maps of water aquifers and maps of radioactivity, are essentially refinements of the basic Ordnance Survey map. They are used by architects and those concerned with the discrete underpinning of the city, those that make the sewers run on time. One further role for the Survey in the governance of the city.

Another role for the map is as a diagnostic tool. Sociologists and human geographers have used maps to describe the city’s ailments. Particular examples of this are to be found in Emrys Jones’ 1960 book The Social Geography of Belfast and in the 1974 study The Spatial distribution of some Social Problems in the Belfast urban area by Boal, Doherty and Pringle but are also to be found in the various city plans and interim plans produced since 1962. In all of these documents there is the suggestion of a utopian project for the city, the curing of its diseases, an equitable distribution of happiness. In its more extreme instances such as The Spatial Distribution... this results in a singleminded precision, as if focused to diagnose the problems out of existence like a magnifying glass burning ants. Boal, Doherty and Pringle produce a map of ‘malaise’ in the city. This is achieved by making a composite map from seven other maps of unemployment, juvenile offences, children in care, illegitimacy, infant mortality, general mortality and crowding. The resulting abstraction, the spatial distribution of malaise, seems entirely arbitrary and the need for it rather obscure.

In these diagnostic maps the obsessive categorisation seems peculiar but also the euphemistic labels given to the city’s problems. So in 1974 it is ‘malaise’, in the 1967

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Belfast Urban Area Interim Planning Policy, Progress report no.3 it is ‘twilight’ housing.

These euphemisms mask the disappointment that carefully scrutiny has not yet removed the city’s blemishes.

The diagnostic element to the urban plans is intended to form the basis for an argument as to how the development of the city should proceed. The greatest of these plans, indeed the summit of the city’s political optimism is to be found in the 1962 Belfast Regional Survey and Plan by Sir Robert H. Matthew. Published in a lavish hard bound book it is illustrated by elegant maps and photographs from the Tourist Board that seem to describe a city that is a prelude to a future ideal. There is even Belfast’s answer to Corbusier’s Voisin plan for Paris from 1925, produced by ‘the architectural group’, included jauntily at the back of the book as if to say, ‘it could even look like this’.

Since the Matthew’s plan was published there have been many revisionary and interim plans that trace the advance of the city’s rubbish out into Belfast loch and no longer mention the provision of police stations. The maps found in these subsequent editions are more frequently simply drawn on O.S. maps implying that original conceptions of the city’s plan are less pressing for contemporary planners.

For constantly inventive cartography there are is the multitude of maps drawn on the back of envelopes and the corners of newspapers. These maps have a subjective flavour more in common with the maps occasionally found in literary works such as those illustrating Dante’s visit to Hell or the domain of Winnie the Pooh. As directions these personal maps look untrustworthy, but they can be intriguing in a way best exemplified by the hand drawn treasure map. The inclusion of a modest personal narrative in How Sarah will drive to B&Q is something other maps do not offer. They can also be ephemeral, describing a particular incident, John 7pm - Bus Stop like a map describing a crime for court proceedings.

Like letters you cannot buy them in shops but you could stop people in the street and ask them to make you one. These hand drawn maps have the most interesting stories to tell. Traditional maps can expand their scope to include a broader range of human experience but for the time being if you want a truly intriguing map you will have to draw the stories in yourself.

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Previous page Notes by the Architectural Group on Lagan bank development proposals Belfast Regional Survey and Plan 1962 Opposite page 1. Growth of the developed area of Belfast 1685 - 1960 Belfast Regional Survey and Plan 1962 2. Location of Redevelopment and Twilight areas Interim planning policy, progress report no. 3, January 1967 3. S.M.P. zones ranked on the sum of seven malaise rankings, in hierarchical groups The Spatial distribution of some social problems in the Belfast urban area Boal, Doherty & Pringle, February 1974 4. Open space map Interim planning policy, progress report no. 3, January 1967 5. Golf courses Belfast Urban Area Interim Planning Policy September 1967 This page 6. Electromagnetic anomalies in Northern Ireland (detail) Contour values represent total force magnetic anomalies in gammas above a linear field for the British Isles.

Courtesy Geological Survey of N. Ireland © GSNI 1959 7. Belfast Roads and Traffic A Social Geography of Belfast Emrys Jones, 1960 8. Belfast Jewish Population A Social Geography of Belfast Emrys Jones, 1960

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A Collection of Statements Jo Roberts Against the model of splitting and separation, Gablick draws on a paradigm of interdependence, drawn from emerging currents in physics and ecology, to propose a re-integration within the self and of the self in society. From this the individual becomes no longer an observer (as if) outside a disintegrating world, but a participating agent in, by election, its death or reintegration; art can act as a catalyst to such a process, even in small ways.

Art, space and the City by Malcolm Miles

The artist’s role is as a catalyst to transform everyday patterns of life from fixed to fluid, from deterministic to existential.

Daniel J. Martinez

The human subject is difficult to map for numerous reasons. There is the difficulty of mapping something that does not have precise boundaries.

There is the difficulty of mapping something that cannot be counted as singular but only as a mass of different and sometimes conflicting subject positions. There is the difficulty of mapping something that is always on the move, culturally, and in fact. There is the difficulty of mapping something that is only partially locatable in time-space. Then, finally, there is the difficulty of deploying the representational metaphor of mapping with its history of subordination to an Enlightenment logic in which everything can be surveyed and pinned down. There is, however, another way of thinking of mapping, as wayfinding. This is the process of ‘visiting in turn all, or most, of the positions one takes to constitute the field…(covering) descriptively as much of the terrain as possible, exploring it on foot rather than looking down at it from an airplane’.

(Mathy 1993) Mapping the Subject by Pile and Thrift

Alone in a city too big for comfort too many people too much loneliness the spirit gets lost under the noise and clatter you can become part of the crowd and fade into insignificance or you can express your craziness and get singled out.

Bangay 1992

To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other.

There is no single point of view from which one can grasp the city as a whole.

Cities are scary and impersonal and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our route through the streets.

But the street is a great leveler, and, returned to the crowd, one shrinks back to normal.

For eight months, the manuscript of this book has come with me wherever I have gone…. This exploration of the discontinuities of city life has provided a steady line of continuity for me.

Soft City by Jonathan Raban

What To Do When Lost 1. Stop; rest; brew up tea or coffee.

2. Take stock of your position.

3. Cast your mind back to the last point where you knew you were correct.

4. Make a decision and stick to it.

Plan Your Route by Victor Selwyn

16 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

BoomTown John Duncan

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 17

Pedestrian Phil Collins

18 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

This is by no means the first document of the peacelines in Belfast. They were, in short, built during the Troubles to separate communities in conflict, and/or those under attack. And whilst at first they were erected by residents, for protection purposes, they have slowly aquired an invisible, pedestrian status, regularly and continuously built into town planning and taking taking on inflated characteristics of contemporary urban design. That is, some roads are much wider than they need be, say, for the amount of traffic they carry; other peacelines now appear as innocuous looking bushes, or the kind of railings you might find in any estate, only higher, and wider; others, running against popular perception, have only been erected in the last couple of years; some find they need additions tacked on at later dates.

It’s the mundanity, rather than the drama, of these architectural barriers that is striking What choices do we make in the reification of these ongoing divisions? How do they differ in material circumstance? And what does it mean if, in their continued existence at this historical moment, we are asked no longer see them?

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 19

NEUE

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2o CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

MITTE BERLIN / CAFÉ GERMANIA JOCHEN BECKER

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We : Rest Nike/Berlin Streetbattle Poster

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Destroy the Elite Anti-Nike Poster by Reclaim The Streets/Berlin

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Berlin Nike Detail of the Streetbattle Poster

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Memory Stone for Dessau Citizen Alberto Adriano, murdered by 3 german nazis in June 2000

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Modern Forces Found in the Marheineke Market Hall, Berlin

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Murderers are sentenced German Main News all photos: Jochen Becker

> CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 21

NEUE MITTE BERLIN / CAFÉ GERMANIA >

F

OR SOME PEOPLE, ‘BERLIN’ STILL SOUNDS TOO PRUSSIAN, AUTHORITARIAN, TOO CENTRALISTIC. WE IN-TEND TO OPPOSE THIS IMAGE WITH OUR COMPLETELY UNAGGRESSIVE VISION OF A ‘REPUBLIC OF THE NEW CENTRE’...SYMBOLICALLY, THIS NEW CENTRE IS TAKING SHAPE IN BERLIN - AT THE CENTRE OF GERMANY AND THE CENTRE OF EUROPE... IT IS THE SELFCONFIDENCE OF AN ADULT NATION WITH NO NEED TO FEEL EITHER SUPERIOR OR INFERIOR TO ANYONE. A NATION WHICH IS FACING UP TO HISTORY AND TO ITS RE-SPONSIBILITY, BUT STILL LOOKING FORWARD... OUR NEIGHBOURS IN EUROPE KNOW THAT THEY CAN TRUST US MORE, THE MORE WE GERMANS HAVE FAITH IN OUR OWN STRENGTH.” FROM THE INAUGURAL SPEECH OF CHANCELLOR GERHARD SCHRÖDER ‘BECAUSE WE HAVE FAITH IN GERMANY’S STRENGTH...’ 10.11.98 THE NEUE MITTE (NEW CENTRE) PROPAGATED BY CHANCELLOR SCHRÖDER IS MORE THAN A SLIPPERY NOTION BEFORE WHOSE VAGUE IMAGE THE SOCIAL DEMOCARATIC PARTY TALKS TO THE CAMERAS. FOR BERLIN, IT IS ALSO A POLITICAL ORIENTATION AND THE COMPLETELY RENOVATED SPHERE OF A MAJORITY SOCIETY WHICH IS CASTING OFF THE PAST AND NOW WANTS TO PARTICIPATE WHEREVER POSSIBLE. THE PROMISE ‘BERLIN’ FOCUSES THE LOCAL AND THE REPUBLIC, THE CAPITAL AND THE METROPOLIS IN THE RECONSTRUCTED DISTRICT OF MITTE, WHERE THE WINNER TYPES HAVE ES-PE-CIAL INFLUENCE. THE NEUE MITTE – WHICH IS NOT FAR FROM TONY BLAIR‘S THIRD WAY – IS ONLY TO BE HAD IF IT IS INWARD-LOOKING, CONCENTRATING AND STABILISING ITSELF BY MEANS OF HISTORICAL SUPPRESSION, MILITA-RY FLANKING, AND SOCIAL AND RACIALLY DEFINED EXCLUSION. THE CITADELS OF A NEW CORE SO-CIETY ARE DEFINED BY HIERARCHICALLY GRADED FORTIFICA-TIONS AGAINST THE SURROUNDING STATES, AS WELL AS IN CONSCIOUS DISTANCING FROM THE “REMAINS OF THE LEFT”, FOR EXAMPLE, FROM FEMINISM (WHICH IS NOW INGRATIATING ITSELF AS “POST-FEMINISM”) OR FROM SUBALTERN CLASSES. IT IS NOT ONLY SINCE THE CHANGE FROM KOHL/GERHARDT TO SCHRÖDER/FISCHER THAT NATIONAL-CONSERVATIVE POLITICS HAVE OVERLAPPED WITH RADICALLY COMPETITIVE NEO-LIBERALISM, ITSELF ANCHORED IN THE RENOVATED NATIONAL STATE. THEY SHARE THE – INSTRUMENTALISED – BLIND SPOT OF FASCISM, AND SEEK TO COUNTER THIS WITH “NOR-MALITY”. WHILST THE RETROSPECTIVE, CONSERVATIVE MIDDLE CLASSES IMAGINES A TIME PRIOR TO NA-TIO-NAL 22 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

SOCIALISM AND THE PLANNED CAPITAL OF THE REICH,‚GERMANIA‘ - WITH THE CITY PALACE, NEUE WACHE, ALTES MUSEUM OR GERMAN HISTORY MUSEUM - AND IN DOING SO MAKES ITS SE-LECTION FROM THE “GOLDEN” TWENTIES, THEGRÜNDERZEIT OR EVEN THE CLASSICIST SCHINKEL ERA, TWO YEARS AGO THE LATER-BORNFOUNDER OF THE LOVEPARADE, DR. MOTTE, ALREADY RECOMMENDED THAT IT WAS TIME THAT A DIFFERENT TUNE WAS PLAYED BY THE “JEWS OF THE WORLD”.DURING THE NIGHT AFTER THE PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS, A BOMB DESTROYED THE GRAVE OF HEINZ GALINS-KI, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF JEWS IN GERMANY AND OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN BERLIN. THREE DAYS LATER, A PIG MARKED WITH THE WORDS ‚ JEWISH SOW‘ WAS CHASED OVER ALEXANDERPLATZ. ALREADY, IN THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF 1999, THE MEMORIAL TO BERLIN JEWS IN GROßER HAMBURGER STRAßE IN BERLIN-MITTE HAS BEEN KNOCKED OVER THREE TIMES, SO THATFREQUENTLY THE POLICE HAVE STOOD GUARD OVER IT. NOW EVEN THE BED OF THE LANDWEHR CANAL IN FRONT OF THE REMAINS OF A KREUZBERG SYNAGOGUE ON FRAENKELUFER IS BEING SEARCHED FOR BOMBS. WHILST DURING THE 80S THE “KREUZBERG BLEND” - CAPABLE OF SETTING UP HOUSE MOST COMFORTABLY, ON FRAENKELUFER IN PARTICULAR - MEANT ADJACENT LIVING, WORKING AND FREE-TIME IN MULTIFUNCTIONAL FACTORY LOFTS FROM THE GRÜNDERZEIT, NOW THOSE WITH MORE EARNING POTENTIAL, OR AT LEAST THE BETTER EDUCATED, ARE MOVING TO INNER CITY AREAS IN ORDER TO PREVENT THEM FROM “GOING OFF”, WHILST THE “GHETTO” POTENTIAL OF THE POORER POPULATION IS RAPIDLY PACKING CASES FOR ITS REMOVAL. BESIDES THE SOCIAL BLEND, THE INTENTION IS TO RETAIN A “RACIAL” MIX, SO THAT – ACCORDING TO THE LATEST SCENARIOS – IMMIGRANTS ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO MOVE TO KREUZBERG OR NEUKÖLLN, WHERE THEY WOULD PROBABLY, DESPITE A LACK OF STATE AID, AT LEAST BE CUSHIONED BY ETHNIC NETWORKS, BUT HAVE TO GO TO LICHTENBERG, WHERE GERMAN ‘PURITY REGULATIONS’ DO NOT ONLY DOMINATE IN THE AREA AROUND THE NAZI ‘CAFÉ GERMANIA’. WHILST THE PAINTERS JÖRG IMMENDORFF (WEST) AND A.R. PENCK (EAST) SYMBOLICALLY CLENCHED THEIR FISTS IN A SHOW OF AR-TISTS’ SOLIDARITY IN THE ‘CAFÉ DEUTSCHLAND’ CYCLE FROM THE EARLY 80S, THE NEWEST GERMANY MAY BE SPELT OUT AS AN UNCANNY RETROSPECTIVE. SINCE THE END OF 1997, ‘CAFÉ GERMANIA’ HAS BEEN ADVERTISED AS A “MEETING POINT FOR NATIONAL ACTIVISTS”. IN THE MEANTIME, REPEATED ANTI-FASCIST DEMOS IN FRONT OF THE CAFÉ HAVE LED TO ITS CLOSURE. CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 23

And so they walked slowl and reached the designate staring white ugliness of C everything that was Belfas Standing there in the desig The Urban Dialectics of Belfast: Cool breaths and flaming sewers Dr Eamonn Hughes

24 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

Brian Moore’s insistence on the arbitrariness of the ‘centre’ of Belfast calls our attention to two aspects of the representation of the urban. The first of these is that, historically, there is no fixed centre to Belfast (or indeed any city). The ‘staring white ugliness’ which Judith Hearne perceives as the centre of a dowdily provincial 1950s Belfast is not the same as the bustling and yet sinister central network of entries and alleyways housing a criminal fraternity from which Belfast is seen to grow in Sam Hanna Bell’s, A Man Flourishing. Bell’s novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century when Belfast was first beginning to develop as a commercial town, and fits remarkably well with Ken Worpole’s account of urban fiction: The rise of the city, in Britain, coincides with the rise of the novel itself, and the two have been inextricably linked ever since ... The English novel itself can be said to have grown out of the streets, stews and rookeries of outcast proletarian and criminal London, a symbiotic relationship and fascination which continues to this day.

From Moore and Bell’s novels then we get a sense of how much Belfast has changed over time, how very different the centres that define it have been. This is the city as, in Patrick Geddes’s phrase ‘more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’. Even in our own moment we can see this historical unfixing of the supposed centre of Belfast.

In the 1950s and 1960s the centre was to be found in the shopping district of Donegall Place and Royal Avenue strung between now gone department stores such as the Bank Buildings, Robinson and Cleavers, Anderson McAuleys and the Co-op. The shrinking of that centre in the 1970s appeared at the time to be purely the result of the Troubles, but as the ‘Golden Mile’ developed in the 1980s and 1990s it became clear that we were witnessing a change of use which redefined what the centre was for Belfast as it did for other cities through the developed world. In turn, as the waterfront has been redeveloped, so the centre of Belfast has moved again, back towards its late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century location. Here then is an historical reason for Moore’s insistence that an urban centre can only be designated rather than actual: it will always be dependent on the use to which its citizens put it and its meaning, if not wholly arbitrary, will therefore be always contingent on its moment in history.

There is a second aspect to this insistence, however. The ‘staring white ugliness’ of Judith Hearne is perceived rather differently in Janet McNeill’s The Maiden Dinosaur: The City Hall, self-important in daylight, now looked like the backcloth for a Ruritanian romance.

McNeill’s novel acknowledges some aspects of the dowdily provincial as represented

by Moore, but also introduces, as here, a strange fantasy element, in which the city functions as a backdrop for the performance of identity, returning us to the arbitrariness of Moore’s signs. The apparent Gradgrindian factuality of Moore’s Belfast seems to be appropriately represented by his surface adherence to the tenets of a realism which is itself predicated on a Gradgrindian belief in facts as comprehensively explanatory. But as Terence Brown has persuasively argued, Moore’s surface realism in this novel is constantly subverted by an uneasiness about the ability of empiricism, and its expression in realism, to fully account for the world. The apparent solidity of Belfast as a place in space is therefore unfixed not just by the historical process of the drama in time, but also by its own dialectics. Moore’s ‘floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in sinking Irish bog has been criticised by Patricia Craig for its sectarian aspects and can be further criticised for replicating a facilely gendered account of British and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, relationships. However, it also calls to mind an aspect of Belfast which its best writers have long struggled to represent: its dialectical existence, rendered here, appropriately enough, in terms of hardness and softness. Belfast, after all, is the city famously ‘built upon mud’ but it is

ly down Wellington Place ed centre of the city, the City Hall. There ... st came into focus ... gnated centre of the city... equally famously ‘devout and profane and hard’ and houses the ‘hard cold fire of the northerner/Frozen into his blood from the fire in his basalt.’ What Louis MacNeice is at pains to catch here is the way in which the topography and geology of Belfast provide emblems of its urban dialectics. Here is a city built on reclaimed sloblands, on alluvial mud, ‘sleech’ as it is called in Belfast. The resulting wooziness undercuts its supposed solidity: ‘always the brickwork tilting, buildings on stilts’ Recent Belfast writers have tended to concentrate on this softer, woozier side of Belfast but only, I would argue, as a means of counteracting the sense of Belfast as a hard and fixed place. MacNeice, in an earlier period, was able to refer both to the sloblands on which Belfast is built and to the shoulder of basalt which provides a countervailing solidity.

The apparent solidity aspect of Belfast gets plenty of coverage at the moment.

Currently the most prevalent representation of Belfast is as a singular place in all the meanings of that phrase: an exceptional place unlike any other, a place with a defined, fixed and unchangeable meaning. The best (or worst, depending on your point of view) instance of this meaning in recent representations is, to my mind, the flaming sewer that makes a striking and wholly unexpected appearance in Adrian Shergold’s television adaptation of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street. It is as if, after some three hours or so of being faithful to the spirit and the intent of the novel, Shergold and his screenwriter feel the need to put on screen a representation of Belfast that will be familiar. A small argument between Jake Jackson and his friend Chuckie Lurgan is thus suddenly displaced by a completely unexplained riot (this is Belfast - there is no need to explain riots here, they just happen) from which Jake escapes by the expedient of climbing down into the sewers where petrol bombs rain down (in admittedly extraordinarily photogenic fashion) and where his attempts to flee are blocked by bars beyond which we see the hate-filled faces of rioters and soldiers. Here is the central and, allegedly far from arbitrary, meaning of Belfast. Where else, these images demand, could this be? What else they insist could Belfast be? This is Belfast as everyone knows it: from the discordant sub-punk power chords on the soundtrack, through the claustrophobic enclosure of the sewer tunnels, the fiery illumination of exploding petrol bombs, the sense of tension and desperation as Jake tries to find a way out from his shit-filled prison, this is Belfast as hell, with Jake as the Belfast Everyman. How such an episode must have pleased the reviewer of Eureka Street the novel who, spectacularly missing the point, accused Wilson of making Belfast boring.

No one surely could say that this episode is boring. Well, actually yes, they could, I can: I have seen this too often; I have been made all too wearingly familiar with various visions of Belfast as hell, and I rejoiced when Eureka Street appeared because to some extent it did make Belfast boring: which is to say that it refused to play the game which it refers to as ‘Belfast is big because Belfast is bad’. What it did was to represent to us a Belfast which was boring insofar as it was a Belfast in which mildly dysfunctional characters were seen going about their mildly dysfunctional lives: here was a Belfast of get-rich-quick schemes, of consumerism on easy credit, of confused and shifting sexualities, a Belfast which refused the crude compass-point geography of Troubles reportage in favour of a geography dictated by the lines of desire followed by its characters. Of course, Belfast’s other side is represented: the novel works against the alleged singularity of Belfast precisely by acknowledging its urban dialectics, and the novel thus centres on two chapters (10 and 11) which represent Belfast as in turn utopian and hellish. I have commented on this opposition, and its relationship not merely to Belfast, but to Western representations of the city more generally elsewhere, so what I want to do in the rest of this piece is to examine one other aspect of the

urban dialectic in regard to Belfast.

If Brian Moore’s centreless city, with which I began, is a place which is, for Judith Hearne at least, empty of meaning, part of what I’ve been arguing here is that such a centreless condition actually produces a surfeit of meaning, what I’ve been referring to as an urban dialectics which can never finally be resolved. Such ultimate indeterminacy extends to all aspects of Belfast, even its actual location. Being centreless, as post-structuralism has taught us, puts a system into play and my final point here is therefore that Belfast itself is in play, not only historically, nor even yet only because of its unsure foundations. It is crucially in play even in its location. As an industrial city in the nineteenth century it occupied an anomalous position in Ireland and was perceived to do so by commentators such as Thackeray: That city had been discovered by another eminent cockney traveller (... Mr N. P. Willis), and I have met, in the periodical works of the country, with repeated angry allusions to his description of Belfast, the pink heels of the chambermaid who conducted him to bed ... and his wrath at the beggary of the town and the laziness of the inhabitants, as marked by a line of dirt running along the walls, and showing where they were in the habit of lolling.

These observations struck me as rather hard when applied to Belfast ... They call Belfast the Irish Liverpool ... it would be better to call it the Irish London at once - the chief city of the kingdom at any rate. It looks hearty, thriving, and prosperous, as if it had money in its pockets and roast beef for dinner; it has no pretensions to fashion, but looks mayhap better in its honest broadcloth than some people in their shabby brocade. The houses are as handsome as at Dublin, with this advantage, that the people seem to live in them ...

From this we get the sense that Belfast cannot be accommodated within an Irish framework in that it can be compared only to English cities (and the ‘roast beef’ and ‘broadcloth’ makes it seem like a stereotypical English squire). And yet, since this comment comes from Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book, the implication is that Belfast cannot be accommodated within England or Britain either: it remains at some level Irish. It is as if neither framework can contain it. Certainly the Irish framework is not accommodating. Indeed, even at the beginning of the twentieth century William Bulfin, another traveller around Ireland, remarked of Belfast that it seemed hardly to be in Ireland at all. The resolution to this problem of location, according to Christopher Harvie, is that Belfast cannot be seen to have been part of either Britain or Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was better to think of it as relating to the other ‘Atlantic Cities’. As the trade and industrial links which constituted that grouping weakened so Belfast had to relocate again. In some ways it could now be seen as having been placed into that mythologised territory where thrillers take place, but it can also be seen, as in Glenn Patterson’s Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain, as having been placed in the field of post-modern urbanity in which all becomes uncertain, unfixed and unresolvable except for contingent moments and in which there is only one map that can be used to find one’s bearings: ‘The city is a map of the city’ but that means it is also a map which allows one to make ‘deviations from the known route’.

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 25

Scopo Daniel Jewesbury

I

t says ‘it’s home time’ in Habitat’s window.

It’s home time. It’s over, you can go home now. Welcome home. In Dublin the signs along the quays used to say ‘If you lived here you’d be home now’. They got the idea from the States (they got a lot of ideas from the States when they were redeveloping Dublin). Martha Rosler organised a project about public art and public space called ‘If you lived here’. If we lived here...

Where’s home? How do you know when you’re home? Who says where’s home? Remember David Byrne singing ‘this is not my beautiful house’?

Remember what Goldilocks got up to while the Three Bears were at Habitat? What I’m trying to say is, do you ever get the feeling that someone’s been re-arranging the furniture?

It’s over, you can go home now. Just like poor Judy Garland, it took us too long (thirty years too long) to realise that there’s no place like home. Or as Ivor Cutler put it, home’s home wherever you are. Is home here, now, or is it somewhere in the future? Is it the place we are or the place we want to get to?

Can we ever arrive there? Can we ever get home?

Did we ever leave? Show me the way to go home.

I’m not from round here. Maybe I can tell you some home truths.

Horizontal Shift The redevelopment of Belfast brings with it a shift from the horizontal to the vertical. We’re used to seeing the gaps and open spaces in the city, to seeing the distance, the elsewhere beyond the city. We’re used to the buildings being in the city, surrounded by it, not all next to each other in continuous lines. Now the view is disappearing in every direction, the horizon becoming immediate, and the possibility of an elsewhere diminishing. We can only be here, now,

26 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

in the city. But a city that allows us even to sense the possibility of an elsewhere isn’t a real city at all.

Living in the city demands an act of faith, a renunciation of any elsewhere. The city must be able to provide all your needs.

I can remember when it all used to be car parks round here.

Those views: the city surrounded by Black Mountain, Divis, Wolf Hill, Squires Hill, Napoleon’s nose, Whiteabbey, Carrick, Kilroot, the Holywood hills, the Castlereagh hills. Like Rome, but that’s only got seven. Standing on the Rocky Road or the Crumlin Road at night, the city glistening down below, the hills beyond at eye level.

Those views, blocked off. Stop dreaming, you’re here. Now. You used to be able to see the Waterfront when you came out of Central Station. The confident new Belfast confronting the old. And winning. Oxford Street Bus Station and the firemen picking body parts off the fence, gone forever and replaced with Joe Dolan and Boney M, Rita Duffy and the continuing carnival of the Ulster Unionist Council.

Someone lost their nerve, though, decided we’d better close this building in. So the Waterfront, which was all about seeing, can no longer be seen. This building which defined itself proudly through vision and visibility, has been hidden away.

The old city’s being redeveloped out of existence.

We’re redeveloping the Troubles out of ever having existed. The city where they happened will be gone soon, unmissed, unmourned. And then we begin again. Year Zero.

What does this mean, this horizontal shift? The map stays unchanged, but that never told us anything. Didn’t reveal the space to us, just revealed itself. It couldn’t tell us about the mental lines and divisions or the vistas offered from the You Are Here.

Perhaps this is just a change in a sensibility, in a feeling of the city, perhaps it doesn’t tell us anything about how good or bad the redevelopment is, or how good or bad the city was. If redevelopment is bad, does that mean we liked it the way it was? People had learned to live with it; is that the same as liking it? The shortcuts and the mental connections, the networks of the city, are being rearranged, forced back into that formal pattern that the map still hinted at, but which had been evaded or simply ignored for so long. This informal, improvised city is going to be brought back into line.

‘They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.’ I always hated Joni Mitchell. Joni, they’re building on our parking lots.

I remember when all this used to be parking lots as far as the eye could see!

As far as the eye could see. What if the I could see?

We’re all rediscovering our image of the city, this home. But it’s not the way we left it, it’s not the way it was last time we looked. We turned around for a moment, we had other things on our minds. Now it’s different, so we try to get to know it again, to read it like we used to.

Imaging the City Everyone can make an image of the city now. We go out with our cameras and our camcorders and reconstruct the city in light and colour, reconstruct it the way it should be (the way it shouldn’t be), so that it’s whole again, so that we can understand it again, understand its fragmentation. It’s almost too easy.

Try it yourself: make the city meaningful. You know all the shots, they’re stored just behind your retina, there’s only so many to choose from; the slow pan, the night-time streetscape, the crowds of empty faces, the melancholy, the alienation. Put the right soundtrack on so there’s no mistaking the mood.

Below left Those Views Below right No Views

We all construct our random psychogeographies of the place, believing that the more random they are (less intentional, less directional) the better. Look: Crumlin Road. I used to live at 100 Crumlin Road.

That was in Dublin. 100 Crumlin Road, Dublin 12.

There is no 100 Crumlin Road in Belfast. The house has gone, there’s just an empty space. (As if there were any such thing as an empty space!) I walked down the Crumlin Road, from Edenderry Service Station, all the way home, with a 5p coin in my shoe.

I’d forgotten the hole in my pocket, the change clattered onto the floor, except this 5p, which slid into my shoe. Outside, the rain fell (having no alternative, as Beckett said) and there were no buses, so I carried on walking. I remembered the graffiti I’d seen around the corner; JOHNNY’S SHAGGING TRACEY AND GINA KNOWS IT. TRACEY IS A TRAITOR TO HER FAMILY. Past the vanished number 100, past the jail, with its line of smart Georgian terraced houses corralled inside the security fence, just the fanlights and the upper sashes visible over the razor wire.

Perhaps these houses will be reclaimed when the wall comes down, lived in as family homes once more. Past the empty courthouse, the Mater Hospital, the roundabout, all the way into town and out again to Botanic Avenue and Rugby Road, all the while, the 5p knocking off my toe, lodging in my instep, bouncing off the leather on the inside of my shoe. I couldn’t find anywhere to take it off until I got home. One hour with fivepence in my shoe.

Where did that get us?

Catalyst recently showed Alan Clark’s film Elephant as part of the Belfast Film Festival. It’s a kind of psychogeography of murder, but one dispossessed of any contexts or meaning, any politics, in which all the murders are treated as the same, all the shootings as one, all equally senseless.

By the end of the film, it felt like the city itself was

killing all these people. And now we’ll take our vengeance on that cruel, sadistic city, the one that blithely hosted so many gruesome murders and mutilations.

What can we say (tell, show, represent) of Belfast?

Well, undoubtedly, this ‘place’ has ‘things’ in it.

Some of them unique, many more not. What’s unique is the arrangement of these things. This arrangement is complex, it changes, it exists in time.

No single person is aware of all the things, nor of all the relations between them. No one person has enough information confidently to assert that all the things are not, somehow, interrelated, nor how they would be if they were.

If we step back, and take it for granted that what we know of the city is not just that which we can prove, but that which it’s reasonable to presume, we can see that even this cannot adequately characterise our relationship with the place. Our understanding of this place, our home, is complex, contradictory, discontinuous, contingent, often non-verbal, even pre-literate. We denigrate it, we applaud it, we identify, and identify with, others’ denigrations, we denigrate each other and ourselves in it. What does a representation - any representation - seek to say about such an encounter with a place, one that is only ever partially experienced at any point in time?

And which can be disproved or disowned in an instant?

What does this map, this photo, this gritty video imagery, really tell us? Does it tell us where we are?

Hardly. Does it tell us where the city is in us? Maybe.

Does it situate us in its own representation of the city? Absolutely. So where are we? Are we at a meeting of lines and colours on a gridded representation of space? Or is that representation inside us? Where doesn’t the map tell us we are?

What relations are not conveyed in this

representation? What relations are not conveyed in any representation? Where are you? You are here.

And where’s here? Here is you.

Where was I? Conclusion Cartography has unsettling connotations in Belfast. Aerial photography has a particular nuance.

It’s still a military business, the Ordnance Survey not yet detached from its background of surveillance and control. The Situationists, Marxists, feminists and postmodern geographers all abhor the conceit of the map, this idea of a total representation of the city, this impossible view, the view of the all-powerful eye, a conceit of mastery and domination, belittling the everyday city, making it just a background, a setting, to other action. The city is not an abstract place, they say, it is the collection of all the social relations within it, contested, mutating relations of domination and exclusion. In Belfast, this power that the urban theorists seek to resist, the visual power, scopic power, of the map-making eye-I is more keenly felt, even though the soldier is being replaced by the more conventional town planner, or the redeveloper. We’re all fighting over different representations and notions of the city, fighting to defend our place within the city, from one another and from this anonymous new army of bureaucrats and capitalists waiting to rejuvenate it on our behalf.

The city, we shout, is us. We are the city!

We’ve been here before. Don’t you recognise it? I think we might be home.

I think we might be home.

It’s over now. You can go home.

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 27

About Town Aisling O’Beirn

Roaring Hannah 1 / 6 / 00 Pouring Shaft 28 / 8 / 00 One of the iron bars from our front door now forms the ring of the pouring shaft in Mikes foundry.

Cinema Fan 2 / 9 / 00 There is a propeller fan built into the rear gable of a derelict cinema on the Crumlin Rd. The cinema has been derelict for years; it has even been burnt out several times by local bored kids.

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The roundabout at Carlisle Circus still hosts the plinth of the Reverend Hannah Statue.

Reverend Hannah was a vocal Presbyterian minister in the late 19th Century. His conservative outspokenness on secular issues of the time earned him the nickname Roaring Hannah. After his death a committee of parishioners from St Enoch’s Church (of which he was the founder) formed especially to raise funds and commission a statue to commemorate him. The figurative statue enjoyed a fine view up North Belfast’s former main industrial arteries.

The IRA blew his statue off its plinth in 1971. When the police came to move it and find its owner no one came forth to claim it. It is now in the charge of the City Council and has been repaired but not reinstated. Roaring Hannah’s current location also affords him a view of Belfast’s industrial life. He is currently wrapped anonymously in cling film and lying crated up in a storage unit somewhere on the Duncrue Industrial Estate.

One time one guy got stuck on the roof as it was ablaze. The fire brigade had to rescue him with their extension ladders. His presence on the roof of a smouldering cinema was a bit incriminating. To say the least. The fan kept whirring away through the whole affair. It is still whirring away, a wind driven silent Cyclops.

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Download the Cat 12 / 9 / 00 The cat disappeared for 2 weeks around Holloween, spooked by fireworks and bangers. The day before his return there was one reported siting of him by Dusty. He was perched on a roof on the New Lodge Rd., no doubt checking out his bearings of North Belfast. When he arrived back mewing at the bathroom window he was a leaner sharper creature. Mike wondered what we would see if only we could plug him in and download the last two weeks navigation.

Spiral Staircase 28 / 8 / 00 They demolished part of the old Millfield Tech recently. I drove past it as the site was nearly cleared. All that stood was a lone spiral staircase that now led nowhere. I went back to get my camera; the staircase had gone on my return. Apparently it had once lead up to the gymnasium.

11. Bad Directions and a Whistle Stop Tour

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Mill Chimney 30 / 8 / 00

9 / 9 / 00

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Mistaken Identity in the Supermarket 5 / 9 / 00

There is a Mill Chimney in the middle of Clonard, but the mill is long gone. The area was built up around the former mills and industry of Belfast. That industry is now long gone but the chimney remains, surrounded by houses local business and building works.

It now serves no practical function and divides local opinion. Some see it as a landmark that should remain as a marker identifying the area with its’ origins. Others see its’ disuse and truncated state as a physical and unstable threat, a vertical, functionless form overshadowing local streets with the possibility of collapse. Both views are analogous to the story of the linen industry in Belfast.

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Gear Cable and Fuel Crisis 13 / 9 / 00

There is still a bit of paranoia about town. I keep thinking I see Johnny Adaire even though he is back in jail. I thought I saw him buying cat food in the supermarket last week.

Of course that would have been ridiculous.

The gear cable on the car snapped today at traffic lights at the bottom of the Grovenor Rd. In this city it is still worthwhile to take it to a garage and get it repaired. There is no panic buying of petrol here, it’s the last thing on peoples mind at present.

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Allan’s Email 3 / 9 / 00

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Allan got an email from a stranger recently. The mail was meant for another Alan elsewhere who was the stranger’s cousin. We worked out that the woman sending the email lived in America.

The detective work was a combination of her AOL address and the vernacular involved in describing meeting Rob Reiner the movie director from the film Cocoon Well, Alan liked this film so much, so he wrote back to her saying that life was great and asking could he meet Rob Reiner. She replied shortly afterwards saying that it might be hard to arrange as he meets so many people that he might not remember her, but that she would do her best. The question is if the meeting was arranged would Reiner travel to Belfast to meet the recipient of someone else’s email? Their correspondence continues.

28 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

10.

Richard got a whistle stop tour of the city centre last week as we were continually sent on wild goose chases around town. We were just looking for a machine that allowed you to make up and print your own web address cards. We didn’t find one but Richard now has a reasonable knowledge of the city centre.

Commuters Inconvenienced 7 / 9 / 00 It looked like the City Bus had cleaved the paintwork clean off the side of the navy BMW as it changed lanes in front of the bus.

Commuters were delayed on Victoria St. and a local panel beater will undoubtedly be busy soon.

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Flight Path 13 / 9 / 00 The Chinooks were flying pretty low over the houses last night. Their flight path took them over Belfast Lough towards the North West of the city so they must have been ferrying in more troops and supplies.

There are less military installations to house this new convoy now, but that’s probably irrelevant as their role is to form a visible street presence.

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Tom’s Bar 30 / 8 / 00 The Liverpool Bar is shut now but still stands out on its’ own like a veritable 21ST Century Alamo opposite Belfast’s Sea Cat. Arguably the best view was over the bar where you could keep an eye on the progress of your pending pint and enjoy a panoramic view of the Bar and its customers courtesy of the large mirror behind the bar. Now one of the best views afforded by this bar is driving over the M3 as it raises you above the city and across the river towards Sydenham

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Scrap Yard Valley 13 / 9 / 00

9.

Belfast still must really be an industrial city.

Its scrap yards emulate it.

The city and the Lough are snugly located in a valley, almost circumscribed by hills and mountains. The affairs of the city happen within this tight perimeter.

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Clearways Scrap Yard encloses you in mountains of base and alloy metals, whilst convoys of forklifts and lorries ferry around within the metal piles, sorting and augmenting the territory.

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CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 29

Talks

Eoghan Mc Tigue.

Rubbing Shoulders, Monday 20th November 2pm Meeting at Catalyst Arts.

5 Exchange Place. Belfast.

The ‘talk and walk’ will start in the Markets area and following a walk from the Markets through the Short Strand will conclude in the Newtonards Road, linking the sites of the two ‘maps’ printed for the newspaper.

The outline of the talk will examine the role architectural redevelopment has had in Belfast’s inner city areas.

Focusing on the development of ‘peaceline architecture’ I’ll be talking about the impact the overhaul of the transport system and housing redevelopment has had on the inhabitants during the early 70’s and through the 80’s. The project will also address broader issues like the relationship between urban development and a subject’s physical and psychological orientation, the de-centring of subjectivity in the Modern City and Belfast’s strange powers of resistance to this phenomenon.

3o CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

Jochen Becker 8.00 pm Tuesday 21st November Catalyst Arts.

Jochen Becker works as a critic (die tageszeitung, Kunstforum, springerin) and cultural producer (Baustop.randstadt,-/NGBK 1998, MoneyNations2/Kunsthalle Exnergasse Wien, 2000) in Berlin. He is founding member of BüroBert, coeditor of ‘Copyshop Kunstpraxis & politische OeffentlichkeitŒ (1993) and most recently published ‘BIGNESS?’ on urban development as well as ’Metropolen’ (2001, together with Stephan Lanz).

Eamonn Hughes /Aaron Kelly

Richard West Walk and Talk

Ole Bouman/ Daniel Jewesbury

Thursday 30th November.

7.00pm Catalyst Arts. 5 Exchange Place. Belfast

5th December- 2.00pm Meet at Dukes Hotel Bar. University Street, Belfast

Monday -Monday 3rd December 7.00pm Catalyst Arts. 5 Exchange Place. Belfast

“new languages would have to be invented”: Aaron Kelly discusses Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man. This paper considers McNamee’s controversial novel in view of the representation of belfast in “troubles” thrillers. it seeks to uncover how in this muchmaligned novel the city actually defeats the sectarian and cartogrphic absolutes informing the conventional thriller. the talk also suggests how resurrection man allegorizes the tribalisation of working-class areas by contemporary urban planning and then seeks to offer alternative pathways for reading the city.

Dr Eamonn Hughes will discuss literary representations of Belfast

In 1914, on the evening before the first world war began, a group of Suffragettes dynamited Lisburn cathedral.

The culmination (and conclusion) of a campaign that had been going on through 1914, they had set fire to a bishop’s palace, a grandstand at a racecourse and numerous pillar boxes as well as smashing sundry windows. This walk and talk will visit some of the locations of the groups activities in the Botanic area with commentary from contemporary newspapers.

Do we have the opportunity for such radicalism today?

Daniel Jewesbury will be talking about the unrepresentablity of Belfast and showing some of his failed attempts.

Jewesbury is an Artist and Writer based in Belfast.

Ole Bouman is a cultural and architectural historian. He works as an author, exhibition maker, imager and consultant in the fields of architecture, visual culture and politics. Bouman teaches architectural history at the Amsterdam Academy of Art.

Map of artificial Town in Army Barracks

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 31

High Noon

3 screen video projection installation Pat Naldi

The marks of position and location are disappearing and the notions of scale and physical dimension gradually losing their meaning in the face of the infinite fragmentation of point of view. Recent advancement in new technologies have provided us with a dematerialization of physical space and chronological time. Space being reduced to time, and distance transformed into speed. The dimensions of space becoming inseparable from their speed of transmission.

The first reasoned conception of the universe was made by the Babylonians (5th century B.C.) who introduced the sexagesimal system, dividing the circle of the sky into 360 degrees, the degrees into minutes and the minutes into seconds. Likewise the day into hours, minutes and seconds, thus relating the earth and sky and allowing the former to be plotted in relation to the stars in a constant and proportional manner.

precursor of cartographic road maps-. Situated on the Gianicolo Hill where the Roman army in 1849 fought against the French troops for their Roman Republic, this daily gunfire informs thecitizens that the sun, at that precise time, passes over the meridian of Rome - 12 21’ 8” -.

Having replaced the use of ‘The Great Meridian’, a solar clock located on the floor of the roman basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in the 18th and 19th century the exact position of the sun at noon was signalled to the gunners by the Astronomic Observatory of the Roman College using a sundial and advising the gunners by letting down a big bronze ball from a slide bar.

Nowadays the gun is electronically triggered.

However, it was Claudius Ptolemy (90 A.D.- 168 A.D.), an astronomer and geographer, who proved to be the culmination of cartography in the ancient world. Whereas the early Greeks had been content to leave blanks in their maps where knowledge ceased, Ptolemy filled in the blanks with theoretical conceptions. It was he who introduced the method and means of latitude and longitude and his influential work ‘Geographia’ constitutes the first general atlas of the world.

Together with the atlas the calendar has been a measure of how the world is understood and evaluated. The imposition of the Julian calendar during the days of the Roman Empire pitched religion against science, Catholic against Protestant, and taxman against trader. It was a full five hundred years before Europe was in synchronisation again. A crossover of science, religion and politics, the calendar now imposes a unified time over geographical territories and has allowed for the construction of a universal space, a homogeneous mapping practice to be applied to all parts of the world.

As historically the location of the sun in the sky was used for measuring direction, ocean travellers throughout the ages became familiar with the sight of the ship’s officer “shooting the sun” at noon with a sextant to find the exact longitude of his ship. The key to longitude being time, the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis, degrees of longitude can be expressed as time, twenty-four hours divided into 360 equals four minutes which equals one degree of longitude. Nowadays in locations spanning the globe from Rome to Capetown to Hong Kong to Sydney, the Noon-Day Guns, consisting of military cannons, fire a salvoe every day at noon marking the sun’s passage over the meridian of that particular location.

Created for Catalyst Arts, the video installation ‘High Noon’ consists of three separate pieces of video footage projected onto three separate screens. Each projection features and continuously repeats its own unique angle of the salvoe fired by the military cannon every day at noon in Rome - Imperial city of the ‘Golden Milestone’ and

32 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

Pat Naldi’s exhibition ‘High Noon’ runs from Thursday 16th November until Thursday 14th December At Catalyst Arts, 5 Exchange Place, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Telephone: 02890 313303 e-mail: info@catalystarts.org

Belfast, August 1969 From the Duchas living history archive in Falls Community Council Robin Livingstone

Aged 8 in 1969

That was the night we were burned out of Dover Street. My brother Pat came in with my da and brought him upstairs and the two of them looked out the top window. My da right up until he died quite recently, never tired of talking about it. It was Johnny McQuaid who was the local MP, he was leading the mob and he was the one who was responsible for it being so organised, because he was telling them to work to rule, “work to rule boys”. I mean quite systematically, it was controlled. I mean they didn’t just come down and take over the whole street and just do things at random. This mob was going from house to house, breaking the parlour windows and throwing petrol bombs in over and back from house to house. My da always said that, he always told that story. He looked up the street and saw them all going from house to house.

Anyway, then we knew we had to get out the back because they were coming near our house. There was a big fence over the back of us. It was like Beechers Brook. It was maybe ten feet on our side but on the other side it was thirty or forty because it dropped into a council yard at Boundary Street. That was where the bin lorries and sweepers and all that stuff was kept. A guy from down the street had gone into the yard, round the back, out onto the division up Boundary Street and got these huge council ladders, like thirty or forty feet up, the size of a house almost. Then we had to go down this. And of course there was glass along the top of the wall and we were all going over that. We threw blankets over the glass, big heavy grey blankets.

You could hear all the shooting and noise and fire outside. The noise is something that stays with me even now. It’s like this great, sort of vague, huge hubbub. It was almost like a biblical movie or something, all this noise you could hear … like a battle …all this great hubbub and everything was orange with the fire.

But we got into the yard anyway and then it just was terrifying at that stage. When we got out onto Divis Street there were all these B Specials in big Darth Vader outfits.

Black trench coats down to their ankles and hats and what have you, and they just attacked us with bricks and bottles as soon as we appeared even though they could see it was a family with children. Anyway, they let up and let us cross Divis Street and we went into Durham Street and we were sitting on the kerb there near where the Blood Transfusion Centre is now. I don’t know whether it was that then. It was a bit quieter.

You could still hear everything and see the orange and everything was lit up with orange and you could still hear the shooting and hear the noise.

Mary Kennedy Aged 31 in 1969 With living in the mixed districts, you just got the feeling that something was wrong. I lived in Beverly Street, just at the other side of Isaac Andrews, its behind the peace line now. When we moved in it was okay. We were there for a couple of years before the troubles started. I would say that in the week leading up to it, there was an atmosphere, there were crowds standing around the corners.

Billy was in England. I was in the house with the four kids on my own. There was a big crash, I went in and my front window was put in. Kevin McLaughlin, he was a student from Castlerock, they lived above Joe McKearney’s shop which was at the other side of Beverely Street. Kevin and his mates came down and helped me out with the kids; they were in their nightdresses. It was fairly late and we got them over to into Divis.

I thought I would be able to go back the next day, I thought it would be all right. We went back the next day, most of the houses on the right hand side going up, they were completely destroyed. My house wasn’t completely destroyed but you couldn’t have lived in it again.

You were never in a position to buy a house or anything again, or move out of your

environment. You were classed as squatter. Because the barricades were up, you were a bit polarised and that, there weren’t many places to go.

Paddy Leneghan Aged 44 in 1969 There was a very tense atmosphere a couple of nights before the 15 August. There was rumour and counter rumour of incidents that had happened in various areas. But on the night of the 15th everything happened then, all the burnings and lootings and shootings and everything else.

There was quite a number of pubs burnt out, both in North Belfast, East Belfast and some along the West Belfast interface and just the two on the Falls Road at the corner of Dover Street and another one further down. Kilpatrick’s on the Crumlin Road at the corner of Hooker Street. It was burned that night and so was the Wheatfield at the corner of Leopold Street on the Crumlin Road, also the Alderman. I think the Alderman could have been burned out a couple of nights before that. I think it was one of the earlier ones. A man called Paddy Mulholland owned it. He’s in Dublin now.

There was another one, Logue’s on the Crumlin Road at the corner of Disraeli Street.

Madden’s two houses at the corner of Agnes Street and the Crumlin Road. There was one on each corner. They had two pubs there. They were burned out. The Admiral Bar on the Oldpark Road and another one further up that was owned by Eamon Murphy.

He was from outside Rostrevor. Up at Ligoniel at the top of the Crumlin Road there was one burned out there and another one a couple of months later.

In most cases they left and went elsewhere or stayed out of the trade. The question of rebuilding in most cases didn’t arise so you had to get compensation for buildings plus the business to start again. So some of them left Belfast altogether and quite a few of them went to Dublin, Dundalk and other places. Some of them are still there and some of them, the older ones, didn’t go back into the trade at all. They were just sick of it.

The licence trade was almost exclusively Catholic. It was a historical thing. The Protestants had no incentive in the old days of the 20s and 30s and before, to go into the licence trade, because it was a hard game with long hours. In those days there wasn’t big profits in it and the Protestants could do much better in other businesses that Catholics couldn’t get in to. So the Catholics were left with the least attractive one which was at that time the licence trade. It was the country lads came in and worked in it. I came to Belfast first in 1939 and served my time in that Alderman Bar on the Crumlin Road. A man called Hegarty had it then. He in turn had been burned out of East Belfast in the 20s. The general opinion you would have heard from people about the 20s was that it could never happen again, but he always said to me significantly, “not alone will it happen again but it will be a hell of a lot worse than ever it was” and he wasn’t far wrong.

Joe Cahill Aged 50 in 1969 There was terrible tension and people sort of knew something was wrong, something was going to happen but they couldn’t put their finger on it. I myself was not an active member of the Republican Movement at that time because I had a falling out.

We believed, a number of us who were ex-republicans, ex-prisoners and stuff like that, we always had this fear that the IRA of that day were not preparing for defence. It was always the big thing within the minds of the IRA of the North of Ireland, particularly in Belfast and in West Belfast, North Belfast and in East Belfast that the IRA would be the defenders of the people if anything went wrong or if there was a pogrom. Some of us had lived through the ’35 pogrom and that sort of thing and knew what happened.

On 15 August 1969 I had been at work that day. I was working for P & F McDonnell, the builders. I was working actually in St Peter’s Parochial House. We were doing renovations to it. . Now McDonnell was also doing a job up on the new chapel in

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 33

Above The destruction of Bombay Street. August 1969 Below The remains of Sarsfield Hall in Dover Street

Ballymurphy. The foreman on that job was a Protestant and he came into work on the morning of the 15th and he said that he wasn’t staying in work that day. He talked to some of the foremen that were there, particularly one boy, John O ‘Rawe and he said to John, “I’m a different religion to yourself but there is something happening here today which” he said, “I’m afraid of”. I met John O’Rawe afterwards and he was saying about the general foreman on the job. He was giving them the message that something was happening. Talking about it afterwards they didn’t actually pick up his message.

He said there was a mobilisation of B Specials that day.

My thoughts were to get Annie and the children out. We were living in a very vulnerable spot just after the Police Barracks in Divis Street and I sort of worried for them. The safest place for them was up in Annie’s own home in the Whiterock Road so a friend of mine took them in the car and brought them up there. That would have been around 6 or 7 o’clock in the evening.

I remember going up towards the Springfield Road, up towards the mountains, and looking over the city and seeing the flames. I knew there was something serious. I’ll tell you what it reminds me of and this is the strangest comparison if you like, the night of the German blitz in Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1941. I had been at a ceili in the Ulster Hall that night. I remember getting up on to the roof of the Ulster Hall and looking over the city and seeing the fires. The night that I went up to the Springfield Road and looked over Belfast and saw the fires, it brought it back vividly to me and I said there must be serious damage done there. But I didn’t think there was as much damage done until the next day going round the areas. You could understand in an air raid there would be terrible damage but to see the damage that was done by people on the streets invading areas, burning houses, it was just incredible.

Maureen Gallagher Aged 15 in 1969 Hundreds upon hundreds came through the refugee centre. They stayed there until they found them something. That was before they set up the temporary accommodation on the Glen Road. There were a lot of people moving out who hadn’t been burned out but they were sort of next in line. And they had the fear that it was going to happen to them. So they left their houses with everything left in the house and arrived with nothing.

You went out in ambulances amidst all the rioting, just everything. But I think because you were so young at the time you had no fear, or thought that anything could happen to you.

As I said I had no fear but I couldn’t understand other people’s terror. There were people collapsing all around you, people were delirious. Older people saying it was like being back in the blitz again, they were terrified.

Sean Mac Seain Aged 26 in 1969 I am a joiner by trade. I have been working at that particular trade all my life since I was 14 and I got involved in learning Irish from I was about 19 or so. In the Irish language circles we decided after the 60s that it would be a good thing if we could set up some sort of community for Irish speaking people We got this piece of ground up in Shaws Road and built houses. And then’69 happened.

In the early 60s I went to work for the Belfast Corporation. Just before ’69 I had moved up to a new premises the Corporation had up in the Whiterock Road. There was a man actually working in that depot who came from the Clonard area. And this day in August ‘69 he came to work and he says “a bit of upheaval around there last night and you know I think I’ll board my windows up”. So we got bits of plywood for him and by the time he got down the thing had started and his house was burnt. That was my first contact with Bombay Street.

There was a group of us thought it was the right thing to do to try and rebuild these streets. It seemed to be an impossible thing to do but maybe it wasn’t so much for us because we had already been building and that type of thing. We had that wee bit of expertise.

It would be I suppose, the Irish speakers who were involved. Sean Mackel was the architect, Chris Napier he was the legal man who was involved in a lot of community work at that time and for trying to achieve a better life for people. Albert Fry did a bit of engineering stuff. Tomas O Monachain, a stalwart Irish speaker who is now living in Donegal, was involved.

I was fifteen. I was doing work for the Red Cross, so when the trouble started it was immediately ‘all hands to the fore’. I went to St Teresa’s and offered my services.

We actually used the plans of our houses up there in Shaws Road for the houses in Bombay Street, the same plan. It was what was available at the time, it was easy to get on with and then we ended up building 31 houses.

Everybody just mucked in and did everything. There was no restrictions, if the doctors handed you medication, you went and gave it to the patients. You assisted to shot gun wounds to the head, sprayed sicitrin powder while they were stitching them.

Possibly the time, the spirit of the times drove me to do something, so literally, I went to work one morning and come out that night and I never went back to work again. I just went to work full time down in Bombay St.

34 CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY

CArToGRAPHy:THE CITY 35

which is available for consultation in the Linenhall Library

Map from the Scarman Report

Industrial premises destroyed

Licenced premises destroyed

Commercial premises destroyed

Domestic property partially destroyed

Domestic property completely destroyed

Key

n a catalyst ARTS PRoject 5 exchange place belfast info: o28 9o31 33o3