The Urban Dialectics of Belfast: Cool Breaths and Flaming Sewers, by Dr Eamonn Hughes

And so they walked slowly down Wellington Place and reached the designated centre of the city, the staring white ugliness of City Hall. There ... everything that was Belfast came into focus ... Standing there in the designated centre of the city... [1]

Brian Moore’s insistence on the arbitrariness of the ‘centre’ of Belfast calls our attention to two aspects of the representation of the urban. The first of these is that, historically, there is no fixed centre to Belfast (or indeed any city). The ‘staring white ugliness’ which Judith Hearne perceives as the centre of a dowdily provincial 1950s Belfast is not the same as the bustling and yet sinister central network of entries and alleyways housing a criminal fraternity from which Belfast is seen to grow in Sam Hanna Bell’s A Man Flourishing. Bell’s novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century when Belfast was first beginning to develop as a commercial town, and fits remarkably well with Ken Worpole’s account of urban fiction:

The rise of the city, in Britain, coincides with the rise of the novel itself, and the two have been inextricably linked ever since ... The English novel itself can be said to have grown out of the streets, stews and rookeries of outcast proletarian and criminal London, a symbiotic relationship and fascination which continues to thisday. [2]

From Moore and Bell’s novels then we get a sense of how much Belfast has changed over time, how very different the centres that define it have been. This is the city as, in Patrick Geddes’s phrase ‘more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’.[3] Even in our own moment we can see this historical unfixing of the supposed centre of Belfast. In the 1950s and 1960s the centre was to be found in the shopping district of Donegall Place and Royal Avenue strung between now gone department stores such as the Bank Buildings, Robinson and Cleavers, Anderson McAuleys and the Co-op. The shrinking of that centre in the 1970s appeared at the time to be purely the result of the Troubles, but as the ‘Golden Mile’ developed in the 1980s and 1990s it became clear that we were witnessing a change of use which redefined what the centre was for Belfast as it did for other cities through the developed world. In turn, as the waterfront has been redeveloped, so the centre of Belfast has moved again, back towards its late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century location. Here then is an historical reason for Moore’s insistence that an urban centre can only be designated rather than actual: it will always be dependent on the use to which its citizens put it and its meaning, if not wholly
arbitrary, will therefore be always contingent on its moment in history.

There is a second aspect to this insistence, however. The ‘staring white ugliness’ of Judith Hearne is perceived rather differently in Janet McNeill’s The Maiden Dinosaur: 

The City Hall, self-important in daylight, now looked like the backcloth for a Ruritanian romance. [4]

McNeill’s novel acknowledges some aspects of the dowdily provincial as represented by Moore, but also introduces, as here, a strange fantasy element, in which the city functions as a backdrop for the performance of identity, returning us to the arbitrariness of Moore’s signs. The apparent Gradgrindian factuality of Moore’s Belfast seems to be appropriately represented by his surface adherence to the tenets of a realism which is itself predicated on a Gradgrindian belief in facts as comprehensively explanatory. But as Terence Brown has persuasively argued,[5] Moore’s surface realism in this novel is constantly subverted by an uneasiness about the ability of empiricism, and its expression in realism, to fully account for the world. The apparent solidity of Belfast as a place in space is therefore unfixed not just by the historical process of the drama in time, but also by its own dialectics. Moore’s ‘floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in sinking Irish bog[6] has been criticised by Patricia Craig[7] for its sectarian aspects and can be further criticised for replicating a facilely gendered account of British and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, relationships. However, it also calls to mind an aspect of Belfast which its best writers have long struggled to represent: its dialectical existence, rendered here, appropriately enough, in terms of hardness and softness. Belfast, after all, is the city famously ‘built upon mud’ but it is equally famously ‘devout and profane and hard’ and houses the ‘hard cold fire of the northerner/Frozen into his blood from the fire in his basalt.’[8] What Louis MacNeice is at pains to catch here is the way in which the topography and geology of Belfast provide emblems of its urban dialectics. Here is a city built on reclaimed sloblands,[9] on alluvial mud, ‘sleech’ as it is called in Belfast.[10] The resulting wooziness undercuts its supposed solidity: ‘always the brickwork tilting, buildings on stilts’[11] Recent Belfast writers have tended to concentrate on this softer, woozier side of Belfast but only, I would argue, as a means of counteracting the sense of Belfast as a hard and fixed place. MacNeice, in an earlier period, was able to refer both to the sloblands on which Belfast is built and to the shoulder of basalt which provides a countervailing solidity.

The apparent solidity aspect of Belfast gets plenty of coverage at the moment. Currently the most prevalent representation of Belfast is as a singular place in all the meanings of that phrase: an exceptional place unlike any other, a place with a defined, fixed and unchangeable meaning. The best (or worst, depending on your point of view) instance of this meaning in recent representations is, to my mind, the flaming sewer that makes a striking and wholly unexpected appearance in Adrian Shergold’s television adaptation of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street. It is as if, after some three hours or so of being faithful to the spirit and the intent of the novel, Shergold and his screenwriter feel the need to put on screen a representation of Belfast that will be familiar. A small argument between Jake Jackson and his friend Chuckie Lurgan is thus suddenly displaced by a completely unexplained riot (this is Belfast - there is no need to explain riots here, they just happen) from which Jake escapes by the expedient of climbing down into the sewers where petrol bombs rain down (in admittedly extraordinarily photogenic fashion) and where his attempts to flee are blocked by bars beyond which we see the hate-filled faces of rioters and soldiers. Here is the central and, allegedly far from arbitrary, meaning of Belfast. Where else, these images demand, could this be? What else they insist could Belfast be? This is Belfast as everyone knows it: from the discordant sub-punk power chords on the soundtrack, through the claustrophobic enclosure of the sewer tunnels, the fiery illumination of exploding petrol bombs, the sense of tension and desperation as Jake tries to find a way out from his shit-filled prison, this is Belfast as hell, with Jake as the Belfast Everyman. How such an episode must have pleased the reviewer of Eureka Street the novel who, spectacularly missing the point, accused Wilson of making Belfast boring.[12] No one surely could say that this episode is boring. Well, actually yes, they could, I can: I have seen this too often; I have been made all too wearingly familiar with various visions of Belfast as hell, and I rejoiced when Eureka Street appeared because to some extent it did make Belfast boring: which is to say that it refused to play the game which it refers to as ‘Belfast is big because Belfast is bad’. What it did was to represent to us a Belfast which was boring insofar as it was a Belfast in which mildly dysfunctional characters were seen going about their mildly dysfunctional lives: here was a Belfast of get-rich-quick schemes, of consumerism on easy credit, of confused and shifting sexualities, a Belfast which refused the crude compass-point geography of Troubles reportage in favour of a geography dictated by the lines of desire followed by its characters. Of course, Belfast’s other side is represented: the novel works against the alleged singularity of Belfast precisely by acknowledging its urban dialectics, and the novel thus centres on two chapters (10 and 11) which represent Belfast as in turn utopian and hellish. I have commented on this opposition, and its relationship not merely to Belfast, but to Western representations of the city more generally elsewhere,[13] so what I want to do in the rest of this piece is to examine one other aspect of the urban dialectic in regard to Belfast.

David Waring (QUB Student)

If Brian Moore’s centreless city, with which I began, is a place which is, for Judith Hearne at least, empty of meaning, part of what I’ve been arguing here is that such a centreless condition actually produces a surfeit of meaning, what I’ve been referring to as an urban dialectics which can never finally be resolved. Such ultimate indeterminacy extends to all aspects of Belfast, even its actual location. Being centreless, as poststructuralism has taught us, puts a system into play and my final point here is therefore that Belfast itself is in play, not only historically, nor even yet only because of its unsure foundations. It is crucially in play even in its location. As an industrial city in the nineteenth century it occupied an anomalous position in Ireland and was perceived to do so by commentators such as Thackeray:

That city had been discovered by another eminent cockney traveller (... Mr N. P. Willis), and I have met, in the periodical works of the country, with repeated angry allusions to his description of Belfast, the pink heels of the chambermaid who conducted him to bed ... and his wrath at the beggary of the town and the laziness of the inhabitants, as marked by a line of dirt running along the walls, and showing where they were in the habit of lolling. These observations struck me as rather hard when applied to Belfast ... They call Belfast the Irish Liverpool ... it would be better to call it the Irish London at once - the chief city of the kingdom at any rate. It looks hearty, thriving, and prosperous, as if it had money in its pockets and roast beef for dinner; it has no pretensions to fashion, but looks mayhap better in its honest broadcloth than some people in their shabby brocade. The houses are as handsome as at Dublin, with this advantage, that the people seem to live in them ...[14]

From this we get the sense that Belfast cannot be accommodated within an Irish framework in that it can be compared only to English cities (and the ‘roast beef’ and ‘broadcloth’ makes it seem like a stereotypical English squire). And yet, since this comment comes from Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book the implication is that Belfast cannot be accommodated within England or Britain either: it remains at some level Irish. It is as if neither framework can contain it. Certainly the Irish framework is not accommodating. Indeed, even at the beginning of the twentieth century William Bulfin, another traveller around Ireland, remarked of Belfast that it seemed hardly to be in Ireland at all.[15] The resolution to this problem of location, according to Christopher Harvie, is that Belfast cannot be seen to have been part of either Britain or Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it was better to think of it as relating to the other ‘Atlantic Cities’.[16] As the trade and industrial links which constituted that grouping weakened so Belfast had to relocate again. In some ways it could now be seen as having been placed into that mythologised territory where thrillers take place, but it can also be seen, as in Glenn Patterson’s Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain, as having been placed in the field of post-modern urbanity[17] in which all becomes uncertain, unfixed and unresolvable except for contingent moments and in which there is only one map that can be used to find one’s bearings: ‘The city is a map of the city’ but that means it is also a map which allows one to make ‘deviations from the known route’. [18]

Copyright: Dr Eamonn Hughes
Originally published in Catalyst Arts Cartography: The City (November 2000) page 24-25

[1] Brian Moore. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. (1955) London: Granada, 1965, p. 76
[2] Ken Worpole, ‘Mother to Legend (or Going Undergroud): The London Novel,’ Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Ficiton, ed. Ian A. Bell, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995) 181-193, 181, 182

[3] Patrick Geddes, ‘Civics: as Applied Sociology,’ The Ideal City, ed. Helen E. Meller, (1905-6; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979) 79.
[4] Janet McNeill. The Maiden Dinosaur. (1964) Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984, p.16

[5] Terence Brown, ‘Show Me a Sign: Brian Moore and Religious Faith,’ Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mulingar: The Lilliput Press, 1988) 174-188
[6] Brian Moore. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. (1955) London: Granada, 1965, p. 76.
[7] Patricia Craig, ‘Moore’s Maladies: Belfast in the Mid-Twentieth Century,’ Irish University Review 18, 1 (Spring 1988): 12-23, 15
[8] Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds, (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) ‘Belfast’, p. 17, ‘Valediction’, p. 52, ‘Autun Journal XVI’, p. 133;
[9] Bell, A Man Flourishing, p. 56
[10] Ciaran Carson, ‘Brick,’ Belfast Confetti, Dublin: The Gallery Press. 1989, p. 72. See also Robert Johnstone, Belfast: Portraits of a City, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990, p. 9.
[11] Frank Ormsby, ‘King William Park’ A Northern Spring London: Secker & Warburg, 1986, p. 53

[12] Sarah Ferguson, ‘Potted Histories: the misadventures of a bunch of drunken 30-somethings in war-torn Belfast.’ New York Times Book Review 14 December 1997, p. 11

[13] Eamonn Hughes, ‘“Town of Shadows”: Representations of Belfast in Recent Fiction.’ Religion and Literature 28, 2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1996): 141-160. 

[14] William Thackeray. The Irish Sketch Book. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1843, pp. 290-297
[15] William Bulfin. Rambles in Eirinn. (1907) p. 117. In the same passage he remarks that although he spent several days in Belfast he feels unable to write about it.

[16] Harvie , Christopher . "Garron Top to Caer Gybi : Images of the Inland Sea" . TheIrish Review No.19 . (Spring / Summer 1996) 44-61.

[17] Glenn Patterson. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain. London: Chatto & Windus,1995.
[18] Ciaran Carson, ‘The Bomb Disposal’ The New Estate and Other Poems. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1988, p.32