An imaginative scheme could house 20,000 people in an historic part of the inner city, writes FIONNUALA O'CONNOR
DOWNTOWN BELFAST, shadowed still by the bad years despite glitzy redevelopment, will change some more if the money holds out. The next scheme may even be imaginative, not dominated by yet more half-empty office blocks. Or, as some fear, it may white out the city’s fractious history and squeeze out citizens.
Young architects who’ve launched a Forum for an Alternative Belfast say that under-used land the size of 500 football pitches could house more than 20,000 people in the inner city in a proper mix of housing and facilities. Minister for Social Development Margaret Ritchie, meanwhile, has appointed a “landscape architect to redesign Bank Square near Castlecourt in Belfast city centre”.
Upgrading has begun on Castle Street, the city end of the Falls Road. Ritchie promises two squares – Bank Square and an entirely new Fountain Square. The well-intentioned scheme is to open west Belfast up to the city’s main drag, Royal Avenue, which involves convincing “the West” to identify with the business district the IRA bombed, and enticing people afraid of the Falls to venture west of the centre.
But Bank Square is on neither walls nor maps. “That newish space in front of St Mary’s”, some say, or “that sort of square in front of Kelly’s Cellars”. On the corner nearest St Mary’s, the city’s earliest Catholic church, a misleading street sign says Bank Street. But Bank Street decayed to an unrecognisable remnant, leaving today’s rough-shaped square. Without the benefit of planners or the vast sums poured into grandly christened steel and glass palaces like the Waterfront and the Odyssey, it has developed by accident.
In its windy space flicker snapshots from 300 years. An 18th-century chapel and a pub the United Irishmen liked; a 19th-century unionist club and a Presbyterian church; a 20th-century shopping mall; a 21st-century fish restaurant with customers who would have run a mile from this part of Belfast until recently. The nameless square has gone up in the world and also stayed ratty. Isn’t that the way of the best cities? Only Kelly’s Cellars outlived Bank Street intact, a battered pub frequented by Henry Joy McCracken and his friends who spoke for Catholic, Protestant and dissenter.
On the rise after hard decades, it sits next to the still-new Mourne Seafood restaurant: good value, unpretentious, selling raw fish out the front.
The hulk of Castlecourt mall takes up most of the opposite side of the square. Then comes the back of Berry Street Presbyterian church, once stamping ground of turbulent 19th-century preacher "Roaring" Hanna. Each Thursday Berry Street does a decent cheap lunch, while smiling women face St Mary's, their backs to the square, at a small table that says "Bibles Free". The Romanian woman selling the Big Issueoutside St Mary's keeps her distance.
Part of the space in front of Kelly’s is a Tesco, but was once St Mary’s Hall. It was not available to the dying (adulterous) Parnell for his last Belfast speech. But Pearse spoke in it, and de Valera; police raids broke up IRA meetings there; the B Specials occupied it. One tale claims Paul Robeson was booked to sing in it, failed to get a visa and sang to the organiser down the phone. Dauntless impresario Jim Aiken brought showbands to it in the 1950s.
Yards away is the back of the Ulster Reform Club (meeting place for Carson and Craig), parasols and fancy terrace overlooking the square’s lingering open-air drinkers. The Reform Club was built to front on to the new Royal Avenue, main street to a rapidly expanding city. Spacious Royal Avenue replaced the abattoirs and butcher shops of cramped Hercules Street, centre of a growing Catholic population – and site in 1813 of Belfast’s first sectarian riot.
The twists of Bank Street hid St Mary’s from Royal Avenue: the new square puts the church on show.
People who know little history remember that it opened (in 1784) with generous Presbyterian contributions, a moment when small, enlightened Belfast acknowledged its new Catholic community, with a guard of honour commanded by leading merchant Capt Waddell Cunningham.
The captain was also an enthusiastic slave-trader, with a plantation in Barbados named Belfast. St Mary’s Hall was built on the site of his “commodious” mansion, from which he could stroll into Hercules Street through his cherry trees.
That, and more – apparently women once sold seafood in the surrounding streets – is recorded in nicely lettered plaques beside the restaurant.
A bunch of fans repeatedly write “Bob Marley Square” alongside, and have it whited out in quick time.
You’d be hard put to find as rich a mix of scruffy old, striving new and ghosts.
A landscape architect might see that it would be sad to choose the most obvious name for somewhere so singular. McCracken Square, anyone?