Abstract
The ‘spatial turn’ in humanities, the idea of space as a social construct, is not new to Irish historical studies. Yet despite the obvious relevance of the concept to urban history, chroniclers of Ireland's cities have been slow to apply it. Instead, Irish urban history is still defined by a stream of narrative histories, and a scarcity of attempts to establish a meaningful theoretical basis for Irish urban studies. This new book by Bryan, Connolly and Nagle is a refreshing exception. The product of a collaboration between a sociologist, a political anthropologist and an eminent historian, its inter-disciplinary nature is one of its strengths. It is a stimulating study of the interaction of public space and civic identity across two centuries of Belfast's history. The book begins in the 1780s, with the Volunteering movement as a landmark in the creation of a civic culture, and the ‘beginning of the end’ for the paternalistic control of the town's proprietors, the Chichesters. The story of a Presbyterian-dominated civil society responding to the inadequacy of official municipal structures is developed in subsequent chapters. It is in these chapters that the authors expand upon the role of urban space within nineteenth-century liberalism. They argue that the century saw the progressive widening of access to public space, as well as an expansion of who constituted the political nation. However increased access to both space and politics remained dependent on acceptance of new controls on behaviour. They are careful to point out the similarities between Belfast's elite and their counterparts in Britain's provincial cities. However, the very different political context these elites operated in meant that Belfast's leaders often failed to live up to the ‘Peelite’ language of modernising and inclusive conservatism. While liberal rhetoric stressed the principle of free access to public space, in Belfast this access depended on conformity to a particular vision; one more amenable to Protestant loyalism than it was Catholic nationalism. They argue that this is evidence less of hypocrisy than of ‘the limitations of liberalism when confronted with a conflict on fundamental values and markers of identity’ (p. 78).
The book then provides an account of some of the well-known aspects of the city's nineteenth-century communal conflicts, such as the riots of 1857, 1864 and 1886. It also analyses how loyalist dominance of public space had to earn acceptance via a new ethos of respectability; a phenomenon reflected in the rise of ‘Orange democracy’ during the 1870s (p. 107). Moving into the twentieth century, the book charts how the political context after 1911 allowed Protestantism and unionism, which already enjoyed a privileged access to public space, to harden into a monopoly. Following partition, the issue of public space and its regulation was central to how the new state of Northern Ireland expressed and defined identity. The inauguration of a new 2-day public holiday in 1926 to mark ‘the Twelfth’ confirmed the centrality of the annual Orange marches as a key civil ritual in the new state. The authors are careful to point out that it was not only nationalists who suffered as a result of the dominance of the Unionist Party. A monopoly of power encouraged a complacency and corruption within municipal politics which was to the overall detriment of society. A consistent goal of the book is to place political and sectarian rivalries within multiple contexts, highlighting stories which do not conform to a nationalist/unionist or catholic/protestant dichotomy. In this regard, the book provides valuable insights thanks to its dissection of the idea of a ‘divided city’ and the dangers of ‘groupism’ in blinding observers to nuances of everyday life and adaption (p. 160). It provides several examples which challenged the monopoly on public space, but which did not neatly fit the binaries of the nationalist/unionist model; namely, the ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches and trade union parades on May Day. The chapters covering the period after 1960 are carefully written so as not to become merely a summary of the Troubles, but instead an analysis of the ‘shrinking of the civic space’ that resulted from the conflict (p. 183). The account of this period touches on well-trodden aspects such as contentious parades and the securitisation of the city centre. However, it also analyses events such as the lord mayor's show and the emergence of the city's St Patrick's Day celebrations in the 1990s.
Turning to the post-Good Friday Agreement period, the book illustrates how the changes ushered in by the agreement have allowed access to public space to groups previously denied it, while loyalist groups have been forced to accept restrictions on previously unfettered practices. Examining the redevelopment of the city in the twenty-first century, the authors chart the newly contested landscape. This includes the disputes over the flying of the Union Jack in 2012–13 and the Orange Order's attempt to renegotiate its access to public space, such as its attempted rebranding of the Twelfth as ‘Orange Fest’. In a brief but punchy conclusion, the authors make some striking points. First, that history and historical usage does not confer any absolute entitlement to public space. Second, that while control over urban space remains contentious, newer events like Pride and Culture Night potentially offer a way out of the established orange/green conflicts. However, the conclusion also contains a warning regarding urban space in an era of ‘parity of esteem’. Namely, that a ‘shared space’ can too easily become a ‘partitioned space’, a tragic squandering of the potential of modern urban life to transcend old antagonisms (p. 233). Crisply written and carefully researched, this book deserves to be read by anyone with interest in Irish urban history, or indeed anyone with an interest in Belfast's past (and its future).