Sina's is an extraordinary shop at one of the most derelict corners in Belfast, that acts as a bridge between two communities. So why do the Belfast authorities want to dismantle it? FIONOLA MEREDITHreports
PERCHED ON A former bonfire site at a bleak north Belfast interface, Sina’s is a cornershop like no other. All around are signs of dereliction: litter-strewn wasteground; once-grand homes walled up and deserted; a row of roofless terraced houses, weeds sprouting from the gutters. And there, in the middle of this scarred and loveless urban wilderness, is an eccentric little shop, windows aglow, like something out of a modern fairytale.
Housed in a shipping container, Sina’s door is open 12 hours a day, every day in the year, supplying local residents with their newspapers, cigarettes, and other daily essentials. But Sina’s is more than a convenience store. In the two years since it has been open, it has achieved something that vast amounts of European peace money, ploughed into healing sectarian tensions in Belfast, have so often failed to deliver.
Quietly, unassumingly and without fanfare, Sina’s has been bringing people from both sides of the community together. There has been no inter-governmental hand-wringing, no labyrinthine discussions between political parties, no Bible-sized consultation documents about a shared future. Simply by being there, right on the interface, Sina’s provides a cosy, friendly meeting place for people from the largely Catholic Glandore area and the mainly Protestant Skegoneill area. Perhaps a few words are exchanged about the weather as they call in for a coffee or a paper; that might lead to a nod of recognition later on the street. Older people coming in to pay their electricity bills meet the tough-looking youths whom they would have previously viewed with fear and suspicion, and find out that they know their grandparents from years ago.
It helps, too, that local woman Lucinda Pollin, who manages Sina’s (Sina is Lucinda’s family nickname), is on first-name terms with everyone. She keeps her camera to hand, and often takes a snap of her customers, displaying the photographs on a digital photo frame on the wall. It shows an ever-changing succession of cheery faces, from the youngest to the oldest residents.
“It’s about making connections, making things human. And it’s all done for love, not money,” says Sina’s owner, William Haire, as he serves Mary, an elderly customer. “This place is like Fortnum and Mason’s,” says Mary. “When the weather’s bad, I phone in and they deliver to me. You wouldn’t get that anywhere else.”
“When we arrived, I was prepared for hell,” says Haire. “I thought the shop would be covered by graffiti, and we’d have trouble of all sorts. But that never happened. We’ve just been here in our own quiet way, 12 hours a day, and it’s made a big difference to the area.”
But now the tiny shop has been threatened with closure by the authorities. The Planning Appeals Commission has given William Haire until Christmas to shut and dismantle Sina’s, on the grounds that the appearance of the shop is “inappropriate” to its location, and because it has an “adverse impact on the character of the surrounding area”. Haire has also fallen foul of health and safety officials at Belfast City Council, who are taking him to court for using a ladder to get access to his storage space – a second shipping container placed on top of the one housing the shop.
In response to a query from The Irish Times, a spokesman for Belfast City Council said that "it is not the Council's policy to comment upon individual cases that are or may be the subject of legal proceedings. The council has a duty to ensure that the law relating to health and safety is enforced and to ensure the safety of the public is maintained as far as possible." The Planning Service said that Haire had no planning approval for his temporary shop, and that it remains its view, upheld by the Planning Appeals Commission, that "the design and materials of the unit are unacceptable in this location".
Haire, who bought the site on which the shop stands at auction three years ago, when it was littered with broken furniture and shopping trolleys, ready to be placed on the 11th of July bonfire, sees a certain irony in the fact that “you don’t need a plan for a bonfire but you do for a temporary shop”. He regards the shipping container shop as a stepping-stone to a much grander, permanent project, for which he has planning permission: a large cornershop and cafe, with four apartments and two garages. Working together with award-winning Belfast architects Hackett, Hall, McKnight, Haire envisages an exciting modern building with “high ceilings, roof gardens and lots of light” that would be the cornerstone of the area’s regeneration. Mark Hackett says the firm responded straight away when it heard what Haire had in mind: “When William approached us to design the building, the way he talked about it was very much the way we like to do things.” But Haire says the new build would cost the best part of a £1 million, and he is “a man of modest means”. He has applied for an urban regeneration grant in the hope that this would allow him to go ahead with the plans.
Together with fellow architect Declan Hill, Mark Hackett is also a founder member of the Forum for Alternative Belfast, an independent group working towards the imaginative regeneration of the city. Hackett takes issue with the planners’ damning verdict on Haire’s pop-up shop. “No one intervened as a number of good three-storey terraced houses in the area were vacated and knocked down. Rather than government agencies stepping in and taking action to protect the high-quality Victorian fabric, they let it disappear. So what’s the point in talking about the context of the surrounding area now, when that context has already been knocked down?”
Nearby Glandore Avenue, which joins with Skegoneill Avenue right outside Sina’s, acts as a physical narrative of the sad deterioration of the area. Home to artists, historians and writers, including poet and novelist Ciarán Carson, Glandore Avenue starts off as a wide, handsome tree-lined street of substantial Victorian family houses. Some of them have mezuzahs, small cases designed to hold verses from the Torah, attached to the doorways, a reminder of the Jewish presence in north Belfast. But as the avenue approaches the interface, signs of decay and alienation start to creep in. Weeds pop up at the side of the road, graffiti is daubed on walls. A red-brick house with double-bay windows stands solitary and ruined, staring sightlessly over the interface itself.
The area has seen its share of trouble and street disorder. During the Drumcree stand-off, several Catholic families living near the interface fled their homes. More recently, the home of veteran community worker Mary Kelly, who has lived in the Glandore area for more than 30 years, was targeted twice in pipe-bomb attacks.
Part of the success of Sina’s is that this is no well-meaning social experiment imposed from outside. It’s not a community scheme, it’s a business (although a loss-making one, as William Haire admits), and it’s run by and for local people. And it is the residents who are determined that it will survive. Far from being a blot on the (already blighted) landscape, Sina’s has charmed, galvanised and united the communities that surround it. Keith Connolly, a graphic designer who lives on Glandore Avenue, grew up in the area, and worked there as a paperboy. He moved back a few years ago, and has watched the process of dereliction: “All the nice architectural brickwork started getting knocked out. Kids were actually dismantling houses, bringing out pieces wrapped in clingfilm and selling them to architectural salvage people. So when William came along with his shop, it was very exciting. The spirit driving it is amazing, and you can’t help wanting to get behind that.”
Connolly says that in other European cities, shops like Sina’s would be celebrated, not shunned. “If there was a similar piece of wasteground in Berlin there would be five container shops on it, and people would love it. I don’t find it unsightly at all. Instead of the area being a flashpoint, now we’ve got a focal point.”
“As far as I’m concerned, the streets of Belfast are dead now,” says William Haire. “There used to be so many shops around here: the grocers, the off-licence, the chemist, the butchers, and the corner shops themselves. All gone. They started disappearing one by one in the mid 1980s and no one ever really noticed they were going until there were none left. These shops provided a living, and they were a way for people to meet each other. We’ve lost the paperboy, the breadman and the rag and bone man too – all that life gone from the streets. Now everyone, from the poorest to the richest, has these pods they live in, with central heating and the television and the computer, and no one needs to leave the house any more.”
One of Haire’s favourite movies is Smoke, a 1995 film about a small tobacco shop in Brooklyn, owned by Auggie Wren, played by Harvey Keitel. Every day for 14 years, Auggie takes a photograph from the street corner outside his shop. “People say you have to travel to see the world,” he says. “Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.” That’s the thinking behind Sina’s shop too. As Haire says: “It’s the simple things in life that matter.”
For Haire and his supporters, Sina’s is also a way to rediscover those lost everyday connections on the street that seem so trivial and fleeting, yet which prove so vital in weaving people together. And while a 20ft by 8ft prefabricated steel shipping container may not sound like the most auspicious place to start, Haire has created something quite special. Everything in the shop has been carefully designed to fit perfectly within the tiny space and all the fittings have been built with the best quality materials. The entire front face of the shop is made from glass, making the interior bright on even the dullest winter day. Inside, the walls are wood-panelled, and the glass-fronted cabinet holding sweets of all varieties is made from mahogany. Doors slide or fold to minimise obstruction, and there’s even room for a proper coffee machine. “Everything is small scale,” says Haire proudly. “To me, there is a great beauty in the size of it.”
Despite its minuscule size, Sina’s sells an extraordinary range of goods. Tins of processed peas vie for space with jars of pickled cockles, and there’s a large rhubarb tart on the counter. Cody, Lucinda’s baby grandson, sits placidly on the floor, gazing out at Hooch, the shop’s friendly mongrel dog. Outside, there are a few bright green tables and chairs for sunny days. And around the back is a chicken shack, built from discarded steel fencing, with its own posse of resident speckled hens. Their fresh free-range eggs are sold individually in the shop, for those who fancy a boiled egg for their tea. The hens have made themselves right at home, and often take a wander across the interface in search of new places to graze.
And yet, if the authorities have their way, Sina’s and all it represents will be swept away, and the interface will be left bleak and empty once more. Many would regard that as a victory for short-sighted bureaucracy over imagination, enterprise and hope. But William Haire isn’t giving up yet. “Sometimes it seems like the world’s against us,” he says. “But we won’t be closing. Even if I wanted to, the people here wouldn’t let me.”
BELFAST PEACE WALLS AND INTERFACES
The Glandore/Skegoneill interface is one of many intersections between segregated residential areas in Belfast, most with a history of sectarian violence. There is no barrier or "peace wall" dividing Glandore from Skegoneill, but huge areas of Belfast are criss-crossed by these sectarian faultlines. Glandore resident Ciarán Carson has described north Belfast in particular as a map of "no-go zones and tattered flags, the blackened side-streets, cul-de-sacs and bits of wasteland stitched together by dividing walls and fences". Originally erected as short-term protection for beleaguered communities, these "sociological toddler gates", as American satirist PJ O'Rourke called the peace walls, have become a permanent fixture, and in the north and west of the city, you're never far from one. Just a few streets away from Sina's shop, the steel peace line divides Alexandra Park in two, cutting through the elegant lines of trees planted by the city's Victorian forefathers. Last year, it was revealed that the number of peace walls has trebled since the IRA and loyalist ceasefires in 1994. There are now 80 permanent barriers dividing nationalist and loyalist parts of Belfast.
