2 - Re-imaging the Belfast Waterfront: De-industrialization and Visual Culture in Sailortown and Queen’s Island

Summary

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the Belfast waterfront has emerged as a space where history, identity, and class relationships are contested through visual culture and public history. On one side of the Lagan River is the gleaming Titanic Quarter, home to Titanic Belfast and a closely curated set of visual culture representations of the industrial past. Across the river in Sailortown, the remnants of a vibrant working-class community have established their own neighbourhood institutions to inform visitors of their perspective on the past and the rapidly shifting, post-industrial present. In this chapter, these two locations are mined for examples of visual culture and industrial heritage to give a sense of how such sites provide insight into the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of de-industrialization and regeneration.

Keywords: de-industrialization; industrial heritage; visual culture; Northern Ireland; post-conflict; gentrification

“What does this place stand for?” Spatial theorist Doreen Massey poses the question to draw our attention to the multiple layers of place-identity that coexist in cities and neighbourhoods around the world.1 The landscapes where we live, work, and socialize are not simply bound by lines on a map; they are defined by the extensive networks of meaning attributed to them through the enactment of relationships. The notion is especially useful when considering the histories of places that have been disrupted and reshaped by economic and urban change through the processes of de-industrialization. There is a dissonance between post-industrial regenerated landscapes, tourist-friendly vistas, gentrified neighbourhoods, and their former existence as places of work, socialization, and solidarity. The dissonance arises as bonds of class and shared experience are displaced by new forms of place attachment. Former industrial workplaces are reimagined as creative spaces or expensive condominiums, for example, while working-class residents are displaced by industrial closure, gentrification, and rental increases. As Jackie Clarke argues, these changes are highly visible forms of economic transition that mask the increasing invisibility of workers and their institutions in post-industrial places.2 Visual culture offers a lens through which these tensions might be further examined and provides insight into the visible and invisible aspects of these transformations.

The waterfront district in Belfast, Northern Ireland is a space where these sorts of tensions are present in the heritage and visual arts landscape, and through international coverage of a recent high-profile shipyard workers’ strike.