The Magic Jug will never be. The 300 plus members a Facebook group set up to oppose thoughtless public art rejoice. Officially, the suspension of the project is due to 'budgetary constraints' and not negative public reaction. Public reaction is similarly off the agenda just a short distance from the city centre in Sydenham. The stakes here are not what is being built, however, but what is being torn down.
A major part of the Titanic Quarter Development involves trading upon the heritage of Harland and Wolff and the Titanic itself. As host to the largest shipbuilding industry in the world, along with related industries, Belfast’s maritime and engineering heritage is notable.
Such is the enthusiasm of the civic authorities for this project, it has received no small amount of public funding: “Helping Belfast rediscover that ‘Titanic Town’ heritage, Titanic Quarter, Belfast Harbour Commissioners and the Northern Ireland Executive have committed £65m to create the £90m landmark Titanic Signature building at the head of the Titanic’s slipway,” states the development website.
However, there are a great number of residents of historic Belfast neighbourhoods that needed no reminding of their heritage. Indeed, these neighbourhoods have been proud of their Titanic Town heritage for generations. They seek to secure this heritage for subsequent generations: “History belongs to us and our children to give them something to look up to and respect, let them see how great Northern Ireland industry was and how it leads the world in shipbuilding, ropemaking, Aircraft and Engineering, we are only a small nation of six counties but a world leader in so many fields. We need to protect our heritage now to enable us to leave it to our children,” reads one entry in the Palmerston Residents’ Association website (PRA).
However, the residents of the Sydenham area in particular are to be denied the chance to mark the role of their neighbourhood in maritime history. The feeling among the residents of Sydenham is that the imperatives of developers – and the politicians in awe of them – have been allowed to trump the lived lives of communities. Continuity, substance, integrity, authenticity have been denied in what feels like conquest rather than development.
Between October 2007 and February 2008, the PRA were involved in an exchange of letters with the Department of the Environment, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency and the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister trying to secure the future of an important site in their area. That site housed two cottages and all that remained of ‘The Den’, a residence of Gustav Wolff, co-founder of the Harland and Wolff shipyard and Belfast Ropeworks.
Despite having a building protection notice (BPN) issued on the building on July 17th 2008, the cottages were demolished without further contact between DoE/NIEA and residents. Moreover, residents learned of a meeting having taken place just two days prior to the cottages’ destruction involving one resident of the Station Road in Sydenham, the developer of the site and an MLA. Terry Hooey of the PRA was left asking: “Who was at that meeting? Why did a heritage office that wanted to preserve these properties change overnight on the say-so of one person? Why was that allowed to happen?”
Despite repeated requests for full disclosure on just what happened, the residents never received an explanation of the reversal of the BPN. The Association smelled a rat, but the dirty work had apparently been done.
When contacted by Naomi Long, on behalf of the residents, Sammy Wilson explained the decision in terms of building regulation in the form of PPS6: “The structures were indeed part of [Wolff’s] now gone estate known as ‘the Den’. However…though of interest, this was not sufficient grounds upon which to protect the buildings. It did not make the buildings objects of special historical interest”.
The question is – to whom were these features not relevant? Sammy Wilson? The Lisburn-based developers who then owned the site, Somerton Limited? Certainly they were relevant to the residents: “You should have seen those cottages. They were beautiful. It took craftsmen to create them, and in a matter of an hour they were gone,” said Terry Hooey.
At various consultation meetings, the residents group assembled to defend their area. They were met with incredulity. The residents were dismissed, simply being told that they were standing in the way of progress. The residents were being managed as a problem, not engaged with as relevant parties. With no reference to wider consultation, we cannot know how much further afield such interest might have stretched. Indeed, the PRA believed that: “In those cottages we had a potential heritage site for a global audience, right on our doorstep. They could have been incorporated into the main Titanic Project at the Harland and Wolff site and could have helped to put the great area of Sydenham, back on the world map.”
The only representative working for the residents, in their eyes, was The Alliance Party's Naomi Long, who unflinchingly took their views as her starting point. This was something Sammy Wilson of the DUP was felt to have failed to do. Subsequently, and following further separate development scandals involving DUP top brass, Naomi Long went on to oust Peter Robinson as MP for East Belfast after his 30+ year reign. One can only speculate as to whether these events were related.
Apart from the Wolff cottages in Sydenham, there is also the deeply felt pride over the heritage of the ropeworks, not to mention the aviation and engineering history of the area. These six counties led the world in shipbuilding, rope manufacture and aviation. The idea that developers seem to have is that heritage is detachable from communities as a commodifiable economic resource. Links to heritage are merely to be exploited as marketing tools. This is what risks actual heritage. The risk is a developer’s idea of heritage unlinked to reality – an economic centre devoid of texture or substance.
Local artist and commentator Daniel Jewesbury is an outspoken critic of unreflective development. “It’s all about this whole neoliberal imperative to unlock the potential, the capital potential, of the built environment. We’ve got more and more complicated financial instruments for turning property development into spectacular returns and you can get a much more impressive return through building something new that nobody particularly wants, necessarily,” he said.
What are the driving qualities of development that shows such scant regard for actual history and culture? Is development aimed at creating retail areas – economic zones – or at improving and building upon existing legacies of the past and the rightful pride of living, breathing, organically developed communities?
Professor of urban geography at Queen’s University, Steve Royle, sees parallels with the present in the past: “We had this when they did Lanyon place. The people of The Markets said ‘is this for us, are we going to get jobs? Can we make anything of this?’ The answer was basically ‘no’. There was nothing for the Markets people in the Hilton Hotel and all the other stuff round there. So, it’ll be the same in the Titanic Quarter,” he said.
In the eye of the developer, cities and communities are blank canvasses upon which ‘visions’ can be realised. In reality, they are homes, workplaces, leisure areas – social settings with history. Who benefits from the imposition of a vision on an area thought of as blank? Surely not those uprooted and displaced. Those who remain, meanwhile, are left feeling slighted. They feel disenfranchised— that without the stories to tell their children of the history, their children have been disinherited somehow. What’s more, when the people go, the tangible ties to the past – the heritage – goes with it.
The damage can be more than architectural, moreover, according to Rita Harkin of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society: “I think it’s giving a sense of history, but in terms of our mental well-being it’s that sense of continuity that things aren’t just disposed of. That you’re building up layers and layers and layers of memories and that’s where your sense of a connection to a place comes from,” she said.
With nothing to evidence the pride that an area such as Sydenham has, how can future generations feel connected to an area? Why, when not connected would they care for an area? As the flags fly from various residences in East Belfast, it seems clear that the vacuum left by the disrespect for this hugely significant part of Belfast’s history will be filled by the easy yet dangerous identifications with tendentious accounts of the past. The pride of world leadership in engineering and manufacturing will be alien to the next generation, replaced by the usual thrill of throwing bricks at the other side.
The broader context of shipbuilding, ropeworks and the associated industries includes where the workers lived, worked, played. The past isn’t just that one harbour region – that’s a developer’s artifice. Moreover, Harland and Wolff wasn’t just the Titanic. However there is simply no appetite, owing to the economic imperatives of retail-led development, to genuinely reinvigorate communities or to pay homage to the past of an area. There is just the drive to zone and build, to unlock the economic value of the region whether that comes at the cost of other values or not.
In terms of retail-led development, diluting the traffic is to be avoided and it’s what would happen if the area – not just the site – were to be promoted. If the heritage were respected and faithfully developed rather than the idea of it formed through an economic lens, retail models projected for the development site could indicate certain lower than optimal returns. The link with Berry Street in the city centre is illuminating.
Originally, the Berry Street wall was built to divide west from east Belfast as a security measure. However, despite the ‘new dispensation’ following paramilitary ceasefires, the DSD keeps the dividing wall as a result of retailers’ stated fears over ‘leakage’ from predictable shopping routes. Were the wall to fall, established models of consumer activity might need to be reformulated. How much more stark an illustration of the influence of private retail imperatives on public bodies, their willingness to acquiesce under such influence and the limits this syndrome place upon the possibilities for individual choices could there be?
“Nobody has really had to learn how to run a city just because all any of us have ever had to learn was what flag was flying where. So to give them anything else like how to run a city how to run a council, they’re lost in that. They cannot think for themselves,” says Terry Hooey of our politicians.
Into this gap, moreover, fall the developers, the retailers, the consultants. Nowhere in the list of concerns for these privately interested parties is the public good. Elected representatives are supposed to do what Naomi Long does – represent the people and what’s good for their interests. What we have illustrated in this Sydenham debacle is the cavalier and ill-informed manner in which those at the top fail to do this.
Given the recent revelations regarding DRD and NI Water; amid whisperings of NIE failings and many more to come, this seemingly indicates a capability deficit at the height of power in Northern Ireland, both at the individual and departmental level. It will be future generations that suffer the consequences.
Years of political violence have yielded to years of feckless leadership. A cultural void could result in another lost generation as rootlessness creates disaffection. Without capable leadership, consultation at the local level is even more important than when the people at the top are the brightest sparks. Only through public opinion taken seriously can the lie of the land be determined and accountability maintained. Only with accountability does legitimacy arise. Without clarity on the processes of planning and the working of agencies such as DSD and DoE, there can be little hope that what Terry Hooey regards as the crime of Wolff’s cottages’ demolition won’t be played out again and again, in your place and mine.
Dr Stephen Rainey
Tutor, QUB
