In the local Belfast press over the past few weeks there have been some very interesting nostalgic and analytical opinion pieces alike regarding the destruction by fire of the Bank Buildings on Castle Junction - both as to where this event sits in the linear narrative of our metropolitan history or amidst the ongoing architectural deconstruction of the city.
As was the case for tens of thousands of other people at home and abroad the Bank Buildings fire - and the near loss of the Kelly's Cellars pub below with its priceless human heritage of late 18th Century European liberalism and non-sectarian republicanism - brought back many memories for myself of not just years of bitterness and waste but also a deeper lost Belfast. From the North Street Arcade to the Elephant Bar near Smithfield Market, the Group and Arts theatres, disappeared bookshops such as Harry Halls and Just Books and Mullans, Gresham Street's pet shop, the Curzon and ABC cinemas, the Grand Central Hotel and GPO on Royal Avenue or even the long derelict Garfield Street where Caroline Music traded in the Eighties.
I remember walking into the latter one late afternoon in 1981 for a few minutes as an earnest sixteen-year-old to buy a cool Jimi Hendrix compilation double album and seeing loads of Stiff Little Fingers fans hanging around in the half-light for a signing session of the Go For It album - the fantastic and empowering instrumental title track blaring out ahead of their arrival. Over thirty years later and I tend to listen to North Belfast's finest a lot more than the Seattle guitarist if truth be known - I should have gotten real and stayed for a while longer that day until they came along.
Even though there has been long-term engaged public attention focused on the future of the Art Deco Bank of Ireland at the once thriving junction of North Street and Royal Avenue - a part of the city which looks so fundamentally North American and modernist in some photographs from the Fifties and Sixties - the scale of what has gone before is deeply sobering. You can see this when looking at old images of the Queens Elms Halls of Residence houses facing the university (as below) or the stunning Northern Bank premises on Donegall Square West. Both of their brutalist replacements being aesthetically questionable in extremis. Only last week I heard in turn that the Masonic Hall on Rosemary Street which contained a mural by the extraordinarily talented Belfast artist John Luke has been sold for commercial development.
In particular there are two moments from Belfast history linked in my mind with the Bank Buildings. There is an interior photograph taken of an upper floor window on Victory in Europe Day on 8th May 1945 with BBC commentator Lt Commander Harry McMulllan broadcasting his observations on the crowd scenes below: "Belfast is letting itself go, that's plain fact - below me the population of this city, laughing cheering and dancing is surging past in great waves of colour and sound in brilliant sunshine." Then from not even a decade later on 27th February 1954 the bittersweet images captured as the last electric trams were seen off by a huge amount of spectators on their final journey from Castle Junction in front of the department store up to Ardoyne depot in North Belfast.
The loss of such cultural cornerstones and social points of reference as a building which has stood on the same site since 1765 - and existed in its modern form since 1900 - is understandably headspinning and certainly reinforces the insecurity which defines our own deeply uninspiring times. Sometimes approximating a daily battle to survive the end of everything good no less. Of similar emotional content to the historical shadowlands above I recently read some reflections on an internet forum of the cross-channel Belfast Steamship Company services across the Irish Sea to Scotland, the Isle of Man and the North West of England:
At the time I lived in Holywood, and could watch the nightly procession of cross-channel steamers going down Belfast Lough. The Liverpool service was first, leaving Belfast at around 8.30. Then came the Glasgow service about 30 minutes later, and finally the British Rail service to Heysham about an hour after that (it had a much shorter journey, as it had no river or locks to negotiate at the other end). And during the summer there were daytime sailings to Ardrossan and the Isle of Man as well.
I travelled often in the post-war years. I liked the Ulster Prince best, she seemed bigger than the Monarch. The Ulster Duke looked as if she had been refloated from somewhere. You could see what looked like tide marks on her walls. The first class in these ships was wonderful: all panelled walls, linen table cloths, soft lights and respectful stewards. The steerage was dreadful: a semi-circle of seats around a broad bare floor stinking of stale Guiness and piss. There was always a sense of travel, especially of departure. An older generation ( before the first war) could remember when a man used to go round the decks with a bell, shouting 'any more for the shore?' It was above all very pleasant to get up early, go on deck, and watch the Ulster coast slowly emerge out of the dawn.
Did you know that although most of the captains who sailed on the Belfast / Liverpool route were not not from Northern Ireland and would take the long way round the Copeland Islands. Those with local knowledge of the waters would take the shorter route between the Islands and the Mainland during the better weather. On its last voyage to Liverpool the Captain of the vessel, a local man whose name i have forgotten, sailed between the Copeland Islands and the Mainland to allow a last view of the ship and people on shore flashed their lights to say farewell.
So on August 28th 2018 a chapter in Belfast civic history came to closure in a matter of hours over the course of a working weekday - the tragic incident at Castle Junction clearly providing a tipping point for public consciousness into all that the city has physically lost to commercial development and urban regeneration outside the parallel context of international conflict and violent domestic discord. It also elicited an outpouring of genuine heartfelt communal love for a great European port that has had way more than its fair share of heartbreak and hardship.
Back in 1981 as Thin Lizzy's hard rock music morphed gradually into generic heavy metal, the album Renegade would yet conclude with the wonderful and still utterly overlooked It's Getting Dangerous. Alike Van Morrison's Madame George the lyrics are obscure but clearly point to the patterns of change, growth and transition we have all experienced. The song also talks about the dangers constantly arraigned around us in life - be that personal corruption or by default immersion in societies guaged to venality.
The Bank Buildings fire opened up rare and fleeting space for reflection about past days of momentous industrial flux and political fraction, of who we are today as a community still beset by cultural division and where tomorrow will take us in a period of highly credible short-term risk. As interfacing with Northern Ireland's grotesque institutional political stasis - and against the background of a still stagnant economic landscape in the North - the public reaction clearly was redolent of deep respect and affection for an old friend who we suddenly realise is not going to be around forever if things progress the way they are going. Indeed neither may the political frameworks that put our now "branded" troubled times into their albeit qualified and edgy endgame.
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