Belfast: The Story of a City and Its People: even lifelong citizens will discover something new

In her Belfast Anthology (1999), Patricia Craig included a piece by the novelist Michael Dibdin — who grew up in Co Antrim — written in 1988. Back then, Belfast didn’t seem to have much going for it. Dibdin concluded: “If our towns, like the French, adopted the custom of listing their attractions — Son plan d’eau, sa piscine municipale — then Belfast might well emulate the village I once saw whose sign, whether in defiance or desperation, read son futur.”

Belfast’s future looks a lot brighter now than it has for a long time, but we only get to that future by understanding the past, which is what academic and conflict researcher Feargal Cochrane aims to do with his new book Belfast: The Story of a City and its People.

Cochrane grew up in a leafy part of east Belfast in the late 1960s and ‘70s, in a family lucky enough to be able to move away to the countryside when “life became more difficult in the late 1970s”. But there I go — and there he goes — already: defining the city from the outset through its lowest point.

It’s a pacy and well-told story, and Cochrane has an efficient way of dispatching swathes of interlinked history with enough information to satisfy the newcomer and enough analysis to please those familiar with the city’s story

On the one hand, the Troubles lasted 30 years, a mere eye-blink in the history of a place first founded as a town 410 years ago, and its 3,500 deaths represented — in the blunt words of Martin Amis — “the equivalent of one bad month in Iraq”. On the other hand, much of the time before the 1970s — from plantation to partition — was a prelude to the Troubles, and the drip, drip of those agonising deaths continues to haunt the city even as it pulls away unevenly into son futur.

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Cochrane’s book, which is arranged broadly chronologically but mainly by theme — The Ships, The Buildings, The Troubles, The Tourism — has two central ideas. The first is that Belfast is not “an aberration” but “a normal city warped out of shape” by its circumstances. The second is that “Belfast has always had a radical edge which has both driven it forwards and, paradoxically, held it back.”

It’s a pacy and well-told story, and Cochrane has an efficient way of dispatching swathes of interlinked history with enough information to satisfy the newcomer and enough analysis to please those familiar with the city’s story. This includes the liberal politics of the Presbyterian merchant class (you read that right) in the 18th century, and the smart marketing of linen as a substitute for cotton during the American civil war, which led to Belfast’s expansion as an industrial powerhouse.

Aside from the Troubles, the other T word that Belfast cannot escape is the name of the unsinkable ship launched in 1912 which was, as the saying goes here, “fine when she left us”. It is no surprise that the Harland and Wolff shipyard in east Belfast had a predominantly Protestant workforce, but it’s still eye-opening to read not just of the Catholic workers being expelled by violent colleagues but the sobriquet (“rotten prods”) given to those fellow Protestants who condemned the attacks — but it all fits into the model of a region which was, after all, literally built on division.

Of course, one of the pleasures of a book like this is that even lifelong citizens will discover something new, and Cochrane delivers on that point. I learned that the culverted Farset river, which gave Belfast its name (Béal Feirste: mouth of the Farset) and is now covered by the city’s High Street, runs through pipes big enough to drive a bus through. Or that one Belfast poorhouse alone, built in 1841, had close to as many hospital beds (1,000) as the entire city does now when the population is five times larger.

These days, the city is shaking off its economic stagnancy if not all of its legacy. Tourism is divided into three Ts: Troubles, Titanic and Thrones (Game of)

In the end, Cochrane, like Dibdin, turns to Belfast’s future: there are tentative signs of the shaking off of cultural binaries, from the opening of a GAA club in east Belfast to the rise (17.4 per cent) in people defining themselves as neither Catholic nor Protestant.

These days, the city is shaking off its economic stagnancy if not all of its legacy. Tourism is divided into three Ts: Troubles, Titanic and Thrones (Game of). Sometimes history needs to be tweaked for these purposes: one Troubles tour was hosted, in its own words, by “the men and women who risked life and liberty and served time in prison for standing up for their beliefs”, which as a euphemism for murdering people like you, takes some beating.

In my lifetime, Belfast has gone from being, in places, a borderline civil war zone, to a popular destination for stag and hen weekends, where you can’t enter the city centre without being passed by a 15-seater “pedal pub” populated with yodelling participants in various states of relaxation. That is progress, too, of a sort.