It could be the real thing - burnt-out cars, the bleak flats complex, the gable wall with its scrawled message, "You are now entering Free Derry Corner".
There are army tanks and soldiers at a roadblock. Protesters on an anti-internment rally are shouting "Brits out".
A billboard advertising poster offers Embassy extra mild cigarettes for 23 1/2p, near a building with the legend "Londonderry Corporation Electricity Department".
But something doesn't quite gel - two gardai are standing by Free Derry's gable wall. As they move off a man stands his children in front of the wall and takes a photo.
The gardai, in fact, are the real thing - monitoring traffic and watching the action from a distance.
Ballymun flats have become the setting for a Granada/Hell's Kitchen co-production about Bloody Sunday. Some 1,200 extras have turned up for their chance to be part of the £4 million production, directed by Paul Greengrass who won a BAFTA award last year for his drama-documentary on Steven Lawrence, the victim of a race killing.
One of the would-be extras is Sally Walsh who travelled from Kilbeggan in Co Meath. "I heard about it on Pat Ken- ny," she says, "but everybody tells me I'm from the wrong era." Sally is wearing a light brown fur jacket, dark red hippy-type skirt and orange boots.
Everyone else appears to be in dark brown, black or khaki. As the demonstrators prepare for a scene a girl watching from the side says: "Look ma, there's the fella from the phone ad". It is James Nesbitt, star of the British Telecom ads and cast in this production as Ivan Cooper, MP, a founding member of the Civil Rights Association.
Other actors play the roles of journalist Eamonn McCann, Bernadette Devlin and other high-profile personalities of the time.
The set is highly realistic. It took three weeks to build and according to the production's art director, Padraig O'Neill, it is factually based on how that part of Derry looked on January 30th, 1972.
"Ballymun was picked because the flats are the closest thing to Rossville flats," he says.
Hell's Kitchen producer Paul Myler explains that the director and Don Mullan, author of EyeWitness Bloody Sunday, have been working on the script for 18 months.
The drama-documentary is done from the point of view of four people: the civil rights activist Ivan Cooper, the British army brigadier commanding the forces in Derry, a British army paratrooper, soldier 207, and Gerry Donaghy, a 17-year-old boy who was shot and killed by the soldiers.
