Accommodation and Apartmentality

Glenn Patterson

Essay Commisioned by Belfast Exposed

Towards the end of 1987 I started work on my second novel. The first had been set in Belfast in the summer of 1969. This one was to be set in the city's (then) here and now. The snag was I was living in Manchester. A few years before this would scarcely have mattered. For most of the 70s and early 80s change in Belfast had largely been a question of subtraction. CEB Brett's seminal Buildings of Belfast, first published in 1967, had been reissued in 1985 with footnotes detailing the fate of this 'very individual' city's buildings of note: 'bombed... demolished... demolished for purely economic reasons... bombed, burnt out and demolished.' By the time I started my novel, however, the IRA's car bombing campaign had been scaled down - or simply stymied by the city's security measures, which had themselves turned the centre into a dead zone after dark - and much of the wholesale housing clearance associated with the building of the new urban motorway, the Westlink, was complete.

On my recent visits home I had discovered that construction was beginning to outstrip destruction. So much so in fact that I was repeatedly having to revise the city I was writing for my characters to live in. I took to coming back for longer, walking whenever possible, as a friend in Manchester had advised I do on moving there to see how the city connects. I also took to carrying a camera. I had no illusions about the artistic merit of my photographs. The camera was simply a box for transporting memories back to my desk. I photographed the fence behind which the foundations were being dug for the Castlecourt shopping centre; I photographed the half-clad skeleton of Tollgate House, among the city centre's first apartment developments, at the corner of Sandy Row and Bradbury Place. (Yuppie flats, people muttered darkly, though in fact the Student Housing Association was involved in their building.) I was particularly pleased to carry away in my box an image of a restaurant that had recently opened on the first floor of the just-built Lesley House in Shaftesbury Square, Scruples Chicken Ranch.

Scruples was a surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) popular word in the unscrupulous 80s. The decade had been heralded by the Judith Krantz novel of that name and, in a market made hungry by Trivial Pursuit, there was even a Scruples board game. For a while I toyed with the idea of putting one of my characters to work - unhappily - in the Chicken Ranch. 'You've read the book,' he would say, 'you've played the game, now eat the shit!' In the end I made him assistant manager of a bookstore chain (modelled on Waterstone's) which prided itself on blending in so well with its adopted cities that everyone, everywhere imagined they were local. Still, the point remained. Change, far from being a barrier to writing the novel, was going to be one of its central themes. I was encouraged in this by another book, Jonathan Bardon's Belfast, an Illustrated History, surely a contender for the title of most important book published here in the last quarter of a century: a 300-page reminder that Belfast was not - as it so often appeared - static, stalemated, but was, like all cities, perpetually in process. It's hard to overstate the liberating effect of this thought on an imagination shaped in large part by the polarities of the 70s.

Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti published in 1989 included an acknowledgement to Bardon's book, or at least to its bibliography. (I was working my way through the bibliography myself, having abandoned the memory box and moved back permanently to write the novel, now called Fat Lad.) Time and again in Belfast Confetti it is the mutability of the city, its resistance to definition, that Ciaran Carson writes about. In 'Revised Version' (a typical Belfast Confetti title) he refers to a photo from 1879 showing the clearance of Hercules Place to create Royal Avenue on which was built the Grand Central Hotel, itself cleared to build Castlecourt...

Viewed in this way over many centuries, each version of the city is as temporary as a face pulled in the mirror.

Sixteen years on from the start of Fat Lad the expression it was trying to catch has changed again, though perhaps something of the mood behind it remains the same. Scruples is gone. Lesley House is now home to Paul Rankin's Cayenne, which in turn is a revised version of his original Roscoff's. You no longer hear talk of yuppie flats. Too many of them. Of us. Of you. In some respects, most notably the reclamation and renovation of docklands and inner-city riversides, Belfast has mimicked changes in cities across the globe. In Fat Lad the Waterfront Hall is still a rumour, is still, in fact, a derelict cattle market; in the novel I have just finished, That Which Was, set in the year 2000, the Waterfront is already old hat: the Odyssey Arena, downriver, is the new attraction. Or new-ish. In the time it took me to write the novel the Odyssey's ice hockey team, the Belfast Giants, had appeared, like Flann O'Brien's Furriskey, fully-formed, become champions of Britain and very nearly disappeared again.

In other respects, Belfast has not followed trends but anticipated them. In his most celebrated book City of Quartz, the Californian urban theorist Mike Davis writes of a 'fortress LA' characterised by paranoia over security and 'architecturally policed' social boundaries. It is a city where public space represents threat, where those who can afford it withdraw whenever possible into their gated communities, and where surveillance is an ever-present obsession. Nothing unrecognisable in this to citizens of Belfast, who already by the time City of Quartz was published had experienced two decades of helicopter searchlights and ever more and ever higher walls between neighbouring - but no longer neighbourly - areas. (Admittedly we had to wait until a couple of years after Davis's book, until after the year of ceasefires, to get the ultimate manifestation of our fear of public places: the wall dividing Alexandra Park.) But while the garish marking out of territory has long been the object of scorn and despair, it is apparent, wherever you look in Belfast today, that measures intended to thwart terrorism and sectarian confrontation have gradually merged with the instincts of the new 'apartmentalized' city.

When the main entrance to the Taughmonagh estate (erstwhile 'Tintown'), close to where I grew up, was bricked in some years back to allow for the building of apartments and townhouses, locals instantly dubbed the new divide the Berlin Wall. Such walls are now as common as peace lines. Elsewhere the exterior of a new apartment development at the junction of Sandy Row and Donegall Road (and dwarfing the Tollgate House flats) resembles nothing so much as a sheer cliff face. When the Rangers Supporters' Club opposite burnt down, there was a suggestion - this being Belfast, Paranoia Central - that it was part of a plot to drive out the old working class loyalist community. What is undeniable is that the landmark Sandy Row bonfire has been progressively squeezed. For many years it was on the site of the cliff-face flats, then, when that site was lost, on waste ground at the corner of Hope Street. (Waste ground... bonfire... Hope Street... You can see why setting fiction in Belfast at times can appear like an easy dot-to-dot.) Now that site too has gone, or at least has been hidden from the general view.

Of course there will be many for whom this is one of the unexpected blessings of the city's current makeover, but it is sobering to reflect, seeing the wooden-pallet towers vying with apartment blocks and American kit-hotels - like boys standing precariously on one another's shoulders to get their mugs in shot - that there is not in the whole of Belfast a single building that has endured for as long as the bonfire tradition.

Indeed at this time of more than usually accelerated transition much of new-build Belfast still has the air of theatrical flats and set dressing. There is a persistent rumour that the Odyssey's roof is only good for 15 years. Fifteen or 150, however, the arena is a future generation's nostalgia. (Future generation, tell us, are you still building the big fires?) One of the best antidotes to despondency I know is a passage from the great Lewis Mumford's The City in History comparing cities to trees: 'once established,' Mumford writes, 'they must be destroyed to the roots before they cease to live: otherwise, even when the main stem is cut down, shoots will form about the base.'

This passage came back to me with renewed force as I looked at John Duncan's series of photographs, which begins with a mature tree being delivered to Waring Street by articulated lorry and ends with a view from the city's western fringe of six new houses. For all the varieties of damage that have been inflicted on it, for all the battles still to be fought over planning and conservation, Belfast, like any city worth its salt, is endlessly adaptable and, in every sense of the word, accommodating.