Hearthlands of Belfast

The young Marianne Elliott with her uncle Charlie Lambert.

Just finished reading this memoir of a post-war reconstruction housing estate in north Belfast (reference 1). I had forgotten what prompted this reading, but having visited both NYRB and TLS, I ran the prompt down to an article by the same author in the Financial Times (reference 6). Belfast being a place I have visited quite often over the years since the early 1980’s, far more frequently than Dublin in the south.

Near 200 pages of text, a couple of batches of photographs, of both places and people, and 50 pages of notes, index etc. No proper maps, which was a pity as Ordnance Survey took some getting to grips with.

Oddly moving, despite being a rather odd book. A tale of largely decent people engulfed in sectarian hangovers from the past. It would be interesting to read of similar people in, say, Manchester and Glasgow, where the religious divide between the big football clubs used to be prominent, even to someone like me with no religion and no interest in football.

It seems that the slums of Belfast were pretty bad before the second war, even by the not very high standards of the mainland at that time. Also that they were badly knocked about by bombing during the war, leaving Belfast with a very serious housing problem at the end of that war, not long before the present author was born in 1948.

Some of this seems to have because of awkward governance, with Belfast City being a large part of Northern Ireland as a whole. But more seems to be the dilatory performance of the City Corporation, predominantly Unionist with very few Catholics – although this last does not seem to have been the main problem and housing was as bad for working class Protestants as it was for Catholics. The population of Greater Belfast was around 400,000 in 1950 and is around 600,000 now, perhaps a third of the total for Northern Ireland. A large city by the standards of the mainland, in there with the large cities of the north, once famous for their manufacturing. While the population of Dublin has doubled over the same period, now something more than double that of Belfast.

 

Noting in passing that the Corporation did manage a very handsome City Hall – of which the population of old was no doubt justly proud.

Noting in passing that religion was a problem for schools in Northern Ireland, with the need to have two lots of schools making provision more complicated and expensive than it might otherwise have been. And there was some of this with hospitals. Problems which the Canadians, for somewhat parallel reasons, know all about. 

White City – as it became known – white for all the limestone and quarries in the area – was an estate built in the late 1940’s, underneath Cave Hill, which dominates more or less sea level north Belfast from the imposing height of more than 350 metres, a green space which is home to the Zoo and to the once famous Floral Hall, in the triangle formed by the Serpentine, Whitewall and Antrim roads. Now somewhat blighted by the M2 running along the eastern boundary, with Northern Ireland’s answer to the spaghetti junction at the south eastern corner. To be seen in the first of the snaps above.

An estate which was built on spacious lines, with a lot more space than would be allowed now, out of flat roofed, prefabricated Orlit houses. These last in the interests of speed. At the time of building, these houses were expensive, with rents somewhat above the average. But they were hugely better than what the tenants had been living in before – probably without proper access to either baths or toilets.

An estate which was built by well-meaning people and which was successful for some years. And mixed, although such mixing has largely been swept away by the troubles and not come back, at least not to estates of this sort. This particular one was demolished and replaced in the 1990’s.

Lots of information about Orlit houses is to be found on the Internet, for example that at reference 4. Cheap prefabrication, invented by an expatriate Czech, which met a need in the aftermath of the second world war, during which so much housing had been destroyed, particularly in Scotland. But subsequently condemned for various structural defects, for condensation, cold and damp. With Elliot reminding me of the amount of water pumped out by the two Aladdin paraffin heaters which we used when first married. With the necessary paraffin still sold just up the road at Pound Lane, at the time we arrived in Epsom, thirty years ago now.

A good read, which I am glad to have stumbled upon. Maybe there will be follow-up.

Then.

 

PS: having written about domes recently (at reference 9), it turns out this morning that Floral Hall in Belfast, had a dome not unlike that of our own Bourne Hall. Once famous as a dance hall, derelict for fifty years and now, I think, being restored; for posh flats or posh weddings, I know not which. Maybe both. The snap immediately above might be how it is today.

References

Reference 1: Hearthlands: A memoir of the White City housing estate in Belfast – Marianne Elliott – 2017.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/i-thought-this-afternoon-that-it-was.html. The map scene.

Reference 3: A Tale of Two Nations – Conor Cruise O'Brien/NYRB – 1990. Not where I started, although Elliot gets a mention for her biography of Wolfe Tone. Looks interesting but too expensive for me, with both Abebooks and eBay wanting the same sort of money.

Reference 4: https://nonstandardhouse.com/orlit-prc-house-construction-details/. 

Reference 5: Arcadia undone The rise and fall of a Belfast estate – Patricia Craig/TLS – 2018. The source of the first of the snaps above.

Reference 6: Northern Ireland’s uneasy centenary: Drawing on decades of writing about the province, one of its leading historians warns it is still far from overcoming sectarianism – Marianne Elliott/FT – 2021.

Reference 7: Greater Belfast street map – Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland – 1983. The map scene revisited. A large double sided affair, as similarly large and awkward as our own Ordnance Survey’s leisure maps of places like Dartmoor. But no physical details, for which I have to turn to the regular maps from the same people, noticed at reference 2.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belfast. 

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/dish-domes.html.