Abstract
Hearthlands was inspired by the desire of Marianne Elliott (née Burns) ‘to tell the story of the housing estate I grew up in, with a sense of urgency given the passage of time and the progressive loss of its original tenants’ (p. 188). This was the Whitewell estate of the Northern Ireland Housing Trust, popularly known as the White City. It was built in 1949 in the townland of Ballygolan in the parish of Carnmoney, just beyond the northern boundary of Belfast city, into which part of it extended. Professor Elliott was able to draw on the recall of a dozen or so of the original inhabitants, amongst them her mother and sisters. Because too few survivors were found she broadened the evidential basis of her book by making use of archival and printed records, local newspapers and also eclectic items she perhaps discovered as a member of the Opsahl Commission, whose report she co-wrote in 1993. Her statement of sources occupies 51 pages. The result is a history (and briefly the prehistory) of the place she remembers vividly as a childhood utopia in the 1950s and early 1960s and which on her return visits, after leaving Ireland for Oxford in 1971, she sadly observed turning into a dystopia.
The unique importance of this book is that it is a treatment of the Northern Ireland Housing Trust by one whose family were tenants. Eligibility for tenancies was restricted to families whose breadwinners were in steady jobs, weekly waged and were paid enough to afford the slightly higher rents to live on a spacious, aesthetically pleasing estate within walking distance of the popular recreational area, Bellevue, with its zoo, dance hall and pleasure gardens. Religious affiliation was strictly disregarded as a criterion and so was mixed. Administration of the estate was exclusively by women managers. One called weekly on the housewife, collecting rent, enforcing rules and regulations, receiving complaints and requests, even checking discreetly that housekeeping was of a high standard and that the marriage was stable. Such conditions, insufferable in the twenty-first century, were acceptable in the 1950s, and the trust was generally very benevolent, as former residents acknowledged. It would not be difficult to see in the trust's model the influence of the nineteenth-century social reformer Octavia Hill, nor surprising that successive chairmen, Sir Lucius O’Brien and Herbert Bryson, were Belfast Quakers.
The natural environment of Ballygolan was its most striking feature. Cave Hill, with McArt's Fort, at over 1,000 feet, towered ‘like some great Moses figure’ over the White City, for whose residents it ‘had a permanent and proximate visual presence’ and allowed ease of ‘access and escape to a wilder, more natural world’ (pp. 8, 9). As well as this freedom, there was every family's security in a beneficent landlord in the Housing Trust and the egalitarian ethos of neighbours at a similar social level. It was a period of prosperity in the wider south Antrim area, an expanding welfare state, and amongst working people politics was trade-union based. It was, in and around Ballygolan at least, an age of harmony and optimism.
Deterioration of the environment of the White City began in the mid 1960s with the construction of the M2 motorway parallel to Antrim Road. It blocked residents’ view of Belfast Lough and easy access to Greencastle village, itself destroyed by a ‘spaghetti junction’. Administrative difficulties caused by the spread of the housing estate across the city boundary were not resolved by the creation in 1958 of a new local authority, Newtownabbey; new ones were caused by a perceived need for slum clearance in Belfast and rehousing in Newtownabbey. The new residents did not blend with the old. Newly assertive religious feeling (exemplified by Belfast city council's decision in 1964 to close on Sundays the Bellevue pleasure gardens, hitherto open every day) was an ill omen. The Troubles hit the south Antrim area hard with the Ulster Workers’ Council strike in 1974: the activists were largely local Protestant men; it ended working class cooperation, weakened already by rising unemployment. White City was no longer religiously mixed: the proportion of Catholics fell from 27 per cent in the 1950s to 4 per cent in 2001; adjacent housing areas, exclusively Catholic, restricted White City residents, while beyond these was an outer ring of Protestant districts. By 1999, there was a so-called ‘peace wall’ to the south of the estate and some previous exits were closed. Cave Hill had become a dumping ground for victims of politically motivated murders. Structural defects in White City houses, built entirely from concrete, with flat roofs and metal windows, and so cold and damp, had been acknowledged by the Northern Ireland Housing Trust by the early 1960s. In 1971, the trust was subsumed into the new Northern Ireland Housing Executive, which lacked the old-fashioned idealism of O’Brien and Bryson; the executive decided in 1984 to demolish the White City; by the mid-2000s, Marianne Elliott's old street was rubble.
To some degree, never obtrusively, Hearthlands is also a biography of a Belfast family belonging (as a prerequisite for a tenancy) to what used to be called the ‘respectable working class’. The author recalls much of everyday life now almost forgotten: regular home deliveries of bread and groceries, bespoke baking, knitting and dressmaking by neighbours, the unrestricted freedom of young people to wander safely to mountain or sea or dance hall, and the attractions of the Co-Op when going into the city centre. It is also a history of decline: the loss of idealism and prosperity leading to social collapse, aggravated by bureaucratic incompetence and political weaknesses which gave rise to destructive rival nationalisms.
Marianne Elliott displays great skill as an historian and also as a writer able to command the ordinary reader's attention. May her Hearthlands inspire others to write as effectively the story of their own Heimat.