Saturday 5 January 2013

Belfast: Borough of Barriers and Boats


Happy New Year everyone! To celebrate the turning of the years I thought I’d do pot-luck with my local airport – I went off to Belfast for 48 hours. It was a good time, although the weather didn’t really allow for much wild adventuring; I spent a lot of time contemplating barriers and boats.

Barriers

I first became aware of the ‘Troubles’ in 1996; I was 7, my Dad was going to London and the IRA had just bombed Canary Wharf. All I understood was, ‘the Irish are angry with us; and that’s why there are no bins’ but still a fairly nuanced understanding for a 7 year old. Then in Year 7 I read a book about a Romeo-and-Juliet-style couple split by the Trouble  centred around the Falls Road. I remember being struck by the story and storing it away somewhere for later use.

Shankhill Road

Later I studied ‘Archaeology of Modern Conflict’ at UCL;  we thought about wall murals and how these can be expressions of identity in civil war contexts. I decided I’d get a closer look and, much to my parents consternation, made a b-line for the Shankhill Estate. Shankhill is a protestant estate with much evidence of said on display. Union flags festoon the streets and there are lots of murals celebrating the centenary of the ‘Covenant’ (when the government in Belfast voted to stay with the UK in 1912). The established ‘Shankhill murals’ are  in the middle of a normal housing estate where normal people live. I saw no trouble while I was there, the only other people around were Shoreditch archetypes, all woollens and digi-SLRs; taking great interest in the repaint peace project and arty photos of the murals; apparently in summer the place is awash with tourists and the bus tours make good money. I walked down Cupar Way which reminded me of the Berlin wall, all arty and ‘give peace a chance’ but still rather substantial; and then onto Falls Road – the Catholic equivalent of Shankhill – Bobby Sands took a fairly central role here and I saw no tourists. 


Cupar Way

On both sides of the wall there was a roaring trade in memorials and a rhetoric of martyrdom. One mural in Shankhill represented nicely some of the thoughts I was having, ‘nothing about us, without us, is for us’; it was painted by someone who lives in Shankhill, for whom that landscape isn’t a fascinating museum dedicated to a dark and mysterious past. The murals are painted on the walls of homes in a living district, I bought a pasty from the sandwich shop, I sent a parcel from a post office in a queue of people waiting for their pensions. No-one wants to live in a goldfish bowl and be gawked at by tourists. Do we have any right to heritage-ise people’s living environment, and if so for what cause? And is it ethical to paint over memorials in the name of peace?

Shankhill Road
Cupar Way

Boats

On my second day I ventured to the ‘Titanic Quarter’; a modernised dock which took my head straight to Dusseldorf and Hamburg where similar regeneration projects have taken place. It’s really modern and features a shopping centre, museums, cafes and art works. On the way I stopped at the Belfast Barge – a thoroughly impressive, although poorly advertised museum. It’s free and it’s on board a boat – what’s not to love! Ok, what I really appreciated about the barge was how many ways it made its point – dressing up clothes, more information in drawers, DVD and touch screen features, testimonials and models – and the clever use it made of the limited space available. I even had a go at hammering in a rivet!

Belfast Barge

I decided to give the newly opened ‘Titanic Experience’ a miss on the advice of a fellow hostel user; ‘you pay £13 and then you can’t touch anything, it’s all lights and sounds and stuff’. Instead I walked an extra half a mile to the ‘authentic Titanic experience’ at the Pump House and Finishing Dock complete with real life tour guide AKA an actor seeking employment. I spent an hour being told many interesting tales of the Titanic’s creation and thought the physical impact of standing inside a giant concrete dry-dock was quite substantial. All the advertising for the Pump House was around it being the ‘authentic’ museum, what did that mean? Authentic because the boat actually rested there for 2 days, authentic because you can actually see and touch things that touched the Titanic? All the time conveniently ignoring the reality that some 2,000 other ships also passed through the same dock. Not sure, but there is something about being able to physically ‘touch’ the past which registers in a different part of my brain and is expected by the audience when they visit a ‘museum’,  that the ‘entertainment experience’ of ultra-modern museums doesn’t touch…plus it was half the price of the other one!

Authentic?

My holiday wasn’t a constant sociology exercise; honourable mentions also go to Ulster Museum (an amazingly in-depth history of Belfast and a lovely collection of butterflies), Maggie May’s café (cheap milkshakes bigger than tankards) and Belfast YHA (which was my accommodation for the trip). Looks like I got back just on time too. See you soon for some foreign film reviews.

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