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2009 2: 337Memory StudiesCatherine Switzer and Sara Mcdowell

BelfastRedrawing cognitive maps of conflict: Lost spaces and forgetting in the centre of

  

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ARTICLE

Redrawing cognitive maps of conflict: Lost spaces and forgetting in the centre of Belfast

CATHERINE SWITZER and SARA MCDOWELL, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland

AbstractNorthern Ireland is currently emerging from three decades of conflict. Belfast, its largest city, experienced some of the worst levels of violence. During these ‘Troubles’ it became a highly segregated city in which its citizens understandings of the urban fabric were mediated through their ethno-religious backgrounds. Yet as the region moves into a post-conflict situation, Belfast has been undergoing rapid physical change. One result of this has been an effort to remove evidence of the conflict from the ‘new’ city centre, despite more than 70 conflict-related deaths having occurred there. The article uses the example of Belfast city centre to explore: (1) how ‘normalization’ strategies employed after conflict seek to reshape cognitive understandings of violent spaces through reconstruction; and (2) how individual memory retains the potential to disrupt these efforts. We argue that the highly regimented spatial patterns of Troubles commemoration in Belfast may influence how the city deals with the challenges of its violent past.

Key wordsBelfast, cognitive maps, conflict, forgetting, memory

INTRODUCTION

Belfast is ‘commonly undertood to be a place familiar precisely because of its un-familiarity: its representation is supersaturated with images of strangeness, anomaly and deviance’ (Allen and Kelly, 2003: 8). Cognitively Belfast was, and still is for many, a place synonymous with violence – a microcosm of Northern Ireland’s 30-year ethno-nationalist confl ict.1 A ‘locus of memory’ (Hebbert, 2005), its streets witnessed some of the worst violence unleashed throughout the ‘Troubles’. Yet since the beginning of the peace process, moves to reshape perceptions and experiences of the city not just for outsiders but for its inhabitants have gained increasing currency. Many of these efforts,

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MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)338

employed by a range of different agencies including government offi cials, investors and community organizations, have focused on transforming the city centre, once a target for paramilitary attacks and the site of multiple deaths, into a multi-functional ‘shared space’ – a considerable challenge in such a deeply segregated city (Neill, 1995); an objective inextricably intertwined with confl ict resolution. This transformation, how-ever, has necessitated a degree of forgetting; it has involved a sustained attempt to recondition cognitive maps of the confl ict, infl uencing how people approach and nego-tiate space once associated with violence and suffering.

In this article, we consider the spaces and voices in Belfast city centre that might be considered ‘lost’ by virtue of their absence from the urban landscape, a striking contrast to many other parts of the city where the confl ict and memories of it are omnipresent; alive in the burgeoning memorial landscape cultivated in the peacetime years (see Graham and Whelan, 2007; McDowell, 2007). Presences, of course, as Till (2006) notes, only tell part of the story and for every presence there is an absence born out of expediency, necessity or inevitability (Connerton, 2008). Forgetting, however, involves many diverse layers of space, time and people. While attempts to distance the city centre from the Troubles have focused on reframing the public’s collective memory through rebuilding and repositioning Belfast globally, the enduring power of individual memory prevails – these are cognitive maps of the confl ict that resist efforts at redrawing. Our objectives, then, are threefold. First, we aim to show how normalization strategies produce lost spaces that are often crucial to the realization of peace. Second, we consider how personal or subaltern memories resist being silenced. Our third and fi nal objective is to examine the challenges facing memory when aspects of it are purposefully elided from the present.

MAPPING GEOGRAPHIC SPACE: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

One of the most pervasive ways in which people map geographic space, according to Hoggett (1992), is on a psychic level. In effect, our minds intuitively shape our responses to and behaviour in certain spaces (see Reay and Lucey, 2002). Social interactions, activ-ities and processes also infl uence how we cognize our environments (see Jameson, 1988). In Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the political situation strongly infl uenced how people interacted with their surroundings, producing cognitive maps that were highly attuned to spaces perceived to be safe or unsafe (Feldman, 2002; Shirlow, 2001). Fear of the ‘Other’, both real and imagined, dictated spatial patterns of movement while acts of violence engrained the fear of specifi c places on the minds of the city’s inhabitants. Thus memories of the Troubles are directly related to these cognitive maps of confl ict. Conceptualized largely as a spatial construct, memory is innately related to place (Alderman, 2003; Charlesworth, 1994; Dywer, 2000) and lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989) that stimulate remembering in fi xed locales ‘actualize’ (Azarhayu, 2003: 2) perceptions, experiences and narratives of the past in the landscapes of the present.

SWITZER & MCDOWELL REDRAWING COGNITIVE MAPS OF CONFLICT 339

As Hebbert (2005: 581) notes: ‘the very process of remembering grows out of spatial metaphors of connection and topography’. For many of Belfast’s residents, cognitive understandings of the city are dictated by memories of violence.

BELFAST DURING THE TROUBLES: SPACES OF FEAR

Belfast city centre

The role of Belfast city centre within the Troubles varied over time as the dynamics and focus of the confl ict changed. Between 1970 and 1974, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaign against high-profi le commercial targets resulted in the destruction of 300 retail outlets and over one quarter of the total retail fl oorspace (Neill, 1995: 54). At one point, the Europa Hotel on Great Victoria Street was reputed to be the most bombed place in the world (Scoular, 2003). In response to the bombs, a ‘ring of steel’ was erected around the city centre. Steel gates were constructed across 41 streets in an effort to protect commercial premises from attack, and all incoming pedestrians were searched by army personnel (Potter, 2001: 82; Ryder, 2000[1989]: 123). This ‘ring of steel’ forced the bombers to alter their tactics, using smaller, incendiary-type devices against city centre targets (Murray, 2006). The security precautions, however, had serious disruptive effects on shoppers and those who worked in the city centre: shoppers’ bags were searched and security personnel boarded buses in the search for concealed bombs (Jones, 2004: 14–15).

From mid-1972, a no-parking zone was implemented around the city centre, and in March of that year the Northern Ireland government, then in its fi nal week, discussed how shop windows could be adapted – for example covered with invisible tape – to reduce the chance of injuries being caused by fl ying glass (Belfast Telegraph, 1972b). Blocks and bollards placed on the pavement prevented car bombers getting too close, while tilted surfaces placed over windowsills attempted to make them less inviting places to leave bombs. Security precautions, both large and small, turned the city centre into a fortress. A 1972 Belfast Telegraph photo caption observed with a certain black humour that the scene around the Grand Central Hotel in Royal Avenue (then used by the British Army):

looks more and more like the western front as time goes by. First there was the sand-bagged sanger, then the barbed wire entanglements, now concrete dragon’s teeth. By Christmas pedestrians will probably need wire clippers and mine detectors in their shopping bags. (Belfast Telegraph, 1972d)

The city centre therefore became something of a battlefi eld and with this status came the inevitability of death. Figures compiled using the landmark publication, Lost Lives, suggest that a total of 73 individuals died in the city centre as a direct result of the Troubles (McKittrick et al., 2004). The places of the everyday – a hardware shop, newspaper offi ces, bars, a post offi ce, an amusement arcade, a restaurant, a car park and public streets – thus became sites of violent death. Individuals belonging to virtually

MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)340

all of what might be considered the ‘participant groups’ in the confl ict died in the city centre: members of the local security forces, the British Army, paramilitaries and civilians are all represented in the total.

Outside the city centre

Although the centre of Belfast was the site of a considerable amount of Troubles-related violence, however, it is important to put this in the context of the city as a whole. More than 1500 people died violently in Belfast as a result of the Troubles in the 30 years following 1969. Research published by Fay and colleagues in 1999 found that, when Troubles death rates were calculated for each electoral ward in Northern Ireland, only 15 of the 57 highest-ranking wards were found outside Belfast (Fay et al., 1999). Levels of violence were particularly high in the north and west of the city: Murray fi nds that, of a total of 1527 deaths in Belfast between 1969 and 1999, 362 occurred in north Belfast and 440 in the Falls area to the west of the city centre (Murray, 2006: 225–9).

In response to the violence and an attendant rise in the pre-existing residential segregation, the built environment of the city itself became fragmented, divided by walls separating each community from the other. Such physical segregation created clearly defi ned areas that were seen as dominated by one community or the other, a situation that continues to impact not only upon where people live, but also where they choose to work and socialize. Particular places and routes through the city are seen as ‘safe’ and others as ‘dangerous’, and ‘the journeys individuals make and therefore their understanding of place and sense of space are always marked by their ethnic background’ (Jarman, 2001: 36) ‘For inhabitants of the city, it is’, as Reid puts it, ‘almost impossible not to know where you are (or at least make an educated – or bigoted? – guess), with cultural, political and religious markers ranging from the obvious to the extremely subtle’ (Reid, 2005: 489). Leaving the more obvious markers such as murals, fl ags and painted kerbstones aside, Bairner’s fl âneur-infl uenced an-alysis of the ‘new’ Belfast revealed how the clothes people wear, the newspapers they read, their conversations, names and even tattoos ‘are alive with symbolic meaning’ (Bairner, 2006: 130).

A full decade after the Belfast Agreement, Belfast remains a physically and mentally divided city in which identity and geography are closely linked. For Graham and Nash:

Identity remains vested in traditional principles of ethno-nationalism that locate cultural belonging and citizenship in a ‘living space’ defi ned by clearly demarcated boundaries and zero-sum models of space and place. Senses of belonging correspond to a geography of territoriality. (2006: 254)

The physical division of communities thus not only serves to render the ‘other’ a ‘menacing spatial formation’, but has also helped to underpin community solidarity for each group (Bairner and Shirlow, 2003: 208). It is here that commemoration, and particularly that of the recent confl ict, has a part to play since it provides ‘a point of identifi cation and demarcation between the communities’, not only in terms of identity formation, but also in the physical geography of the urban and memorial landscape (Wilson and Stapleton, 2005: 637).

SWITZER & MCDOWELL REDRAWING COGNITIVE MAPS OF CONFLICT 341

NORMALIZATION AND UNMARKED PLACES IN THE CITY CENTRE

Cognizing peace through normalization

As we have seen, the Troubles resulted in large-scale material interventions in the urban landscape of Northern Ireland’s towns and cities. The architecture of city and town centres was altered to defend against paramilitary attacks with steel barriers, iron shutters and ‘terrorist-proof’ buildings. Paramilitary attacks, and the ongoing effort to prevent them, removed many vestiges of normality from urban centres. In the post-confl ict years, these defensive landscapes have been partially dismantled and neutralized as part of ‘normalization’ strategies adopted to eradicate ‘spaces of fear’ (Shirlow, 2003) and instil faith in the peace process. Normalization, a term fi rst coined by British Prime Minister, John Major, in 1994, was (and still is) aimed at introducing degrees of normality to Northern Ireland through the removal of military structures and the re-integration of society. In Belfast the normalization process, assisted by advances in the political situation, has permitted the removal of many of the more obvious ele-ments of the existing security infrastructure. Ellis and McKay observed in 2000 that: ‘The major security presence in the shape of army patrols and road blocks have almost all now been removed, enabling much greater freedom of movements and has lifted the psychological strain of living in a city under siege’ (Ellis and McKay, 2000: 113).

The impact of other remaining elements of the Troubles landscape, such as the Peacelines (which have paradoxically increased since the advent of peace), has been softened through aestheticization and the planting of trees and shrubs (Jarman, 2002). The decreased level of violence has also encouraged commercial interests to invest in the city centre, the face of which has changed radically in recent years. There is ‘a propaganda drive to make Belfast appear normal … led by retail interests and their architecture’ (Brett, 2004: 26). Money has poured into the city, much of it via the recently wound-up Laganside Corporation, which estimated that between 1989 and 2007 it has overseen an investment of some £1 billion in the riverside area adjacent to the city centre, fi ve-sixths of which came from the private sector (Northern Ireland Executive, 2007; see also Fitzsimons, 1995).

Some of the new buildings erected during this time would have been unthinkable during the worst of the Troubles. The architectural use of glass in particular is a statement of confi dence that the bombers will not return. In the 1980s, the ‘construction of the Castle Court shopping mall, out of glass in a zone of confl ict … was a key symbol of … increasing confi dence’ (Shirlow, 2006: 100). Jones observes that: ‘In modern “civilized” Belfast we now have glass windows. We can now see people eating and drinking from the street. That’s a big change. Look at Café Deauville or the trendy Chokdee on Bedford Street. This street was very popular with our bombers.’ (Jones, 2004: 15). Neill (2006: 114) also notes that: ‘Glass is now the representational form of choice for development in the post-confl ict city as an obvious contrast to the brutalist terror-proofed buildings of “the Troubles”.’ One of the most prominent new additions to the city centre is Victoria Square, a £320 million shopping centre spanned by a glass

MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)342

dome 35 m in diameter. The urban landscape is thus being divested of evidence of the confl ict; partly through the demilitarization and removal of visible security apparatus that is part of the peace process, partly through the ‘beautifi cation’ of remaining elements such as the Peacelines and police stations and partly through redevelopment and private enterprise.

The redevelopment of the city centre may be indicative of a ‘desire to present a normal place’, but the process of ‘normalization’ in the city centre is nothing new; even at the height of the republican bombing campaign, businesses cleaned up the damage and re-opened (Shirlow, 2006: 100). Yet the ‘post-confl ict’ situation of today provides a rather different context for the same process of normalization. The destruction of seemingly ordinary or functional architecture can, as Coward (2006) observes, be viewed as ‘urbicide’: a symbolic attack on the existence of shared spaces. The peace-time reconstruction of cityscapes scarred by confl ict is not as Ariff (2004) suggests borne solely out of sheer economic necessity. It is synonymous with peace-building and inexorably linked not just to the economic regeneration of a city or country but to the social and political well-being of the population more generally (Harme and Sullivan, 2002: 89; Vayryen, 1997: 57). Reconstruction is laden with symbolism, grounded in the physical, architectural negotiation of disputed pasts and idealized futures that are entwined with efforts to reconcile and resolve (Ariff, 2004). Mediating reconstruction, he believes, can be read as the mending of ‘fi ssured social tensions on a material envir-onment’ (Ariff, 2004). The return to use of buildings scarred by confl ict (Foote 1997) can symbolize strength and hope while the physicality of new innovative designs serves to facilitate journeys from a troubled past to a brighter future. Tzifakis and Tsardandis (2006: 67) believe that the main goal of post-confl ict reconstruction is to ‘instigate a major shift in the ideology and operations of the political structure’. In the case of Belfast, the city’s ideational representation is entwined with governmental imaginings of the ever-elusive ‘shared society’, a term that has permeated offi cial rhetoric since the signing of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which sought to end violence in the region (see Graham and Nash, 2006).

Achieving a shared future and a shared space would appear to involve a degree of forgetting, at least in Belfast’s city centre. It has been argued that these ‘postmodernist aesthetics ... seek to induce historical amnesia’, no doubt a formidable task (Neill, 1995: 69). Amnesia, Neill asserts, is imperative if the centre is to become one of the few truly neutral public spaces in a deeply segregated city. Leaving aside for a moment the confl ict-related deaths that occurred there, framing Belfast city centre as a neutral space is perhaps an unrealistic venture given the diverse meanings it encapsulates for many of the city’s inhabitants. For Irish republicans, the spaces of urban civic culture represent the Union with Britain that they seek to reverse, and as a result the City Hall in particular has been the focus of republican protest. Historically, the City Hall also has relevance for Unionists through its role as the symbolic focal point for resistance to Home Rule in 1912 and also for protests against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 (Jackson, 1992). Yet even if it cannot be viewed as neutral per se, in practice the city centre remains an ‘important shared space’ (Boal, 1982: 694), albeit one in which ‘people are often happier to be closer to the particular road that leads to and from their

SWITZER & MCDOWELL REDRAWING COGNITIVE MAPS OF CONFLICT 343

segregated neighbourhood’ (Bairner, 2006: 129). The subtleties of these negotiations of place are beyond the grasp of a visitor to the city, and for the uninformed, the lack of the more obvious markers of territory evident elsewhere in the city make this area neutral space. While the quest for shared space is undoubtedly crucial for post-confl ict Northern Ireland, normalization – in effect, making the city look more like any other city – has the effect of eradicating evidence of the Troubles from the city centre, and thus effectively writing the confl ict out of its history.

Unmarked places

Writing the Troubles out of the centre of Belfast entails dealing with two contributing factors. We have discussed the fi rst above, namely that a combination of interests have led to the removal of most of the checkpoints and other security precautions that were visible evidence of the general confl ict. Damage has been repaired and new buildings erected that consciously break from the past. The second factor that must be considered relates to specifi c locations within the city centre and the lack of any visible commemoration of the Troubles-related acts of violence that have occurred there.

Foote’s well-known typology divides the continuum of societal response to such sites into four (Foote, 1997). The fi rst category, sanctifi cation, involves the creation of a sacred place, usually through the creation of a monument or other memorial intended for perpetuity. The memorial will be publicly consecrated and attract continued ritual commemoration. The second category is that of designation, which also involves the marking of particular places but without the element of consecration that distinguishes sanctifi ed sites. Places that are designated arise from events acknowledged as important but lacking the heroic or sacrifi cial qualities associated with sanctifi ed places. The third category is that of rectifi cation, in which the site of violence or tragedy is tidied up and re-used without reference to what has occurred there. Generally, such events ‘fail to gain the sense of signifi cance that inspires sanctifi cation or designation and lack the shameful connotations that spur obliteration’ (Foote, 1997: 23). This latter category is the fourth identifi ed by Foote. In many respects, the opposite of sanctifi cation, obliteration involves not just removing the immediate signs of traumatic events but effectively effacing the evidence from existence: ‘the site is not just cleansed but scoured’ (Foote, 1997: 24). It results from the desire to forget sites associated with notorious characters and events: gangsters, assassins, mass-murderers.

Clearly sites of trauma and violence, whether marked through sanctifi cation or designation, include both urban and rural locations, both of which are examined in Foote’s book. However, while the rural landscapes of, for example, former battlefi elds, may provide a sense of moral resonance and authority as ‘ditches, mounds, ruins and apparently barren tracts … [can be] … seen as “historical traces”’, the more obvious change visible in the urban landscapes being discussed here provides a rather different context for physical memorialization (Gough, 2006: 41). In the urban case, the landscape surrounding the site of violence may become totally changed over time as the cityscape evolves: buildings may be demolished and others erected, for example, while the demands of traffi c may result in alterations in the layout of roads and the

MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)344

areas immediately surrounding them. It is undeniable that ‘as the city’s fabric changes, so do the spaces through which memories take form’, but urban change does not necessitate the erasure of physical markers of memory from the landscape (Pinder, 2001: 9). A number of European cities, for example, are marked with plaques and other memorials marking sites associated with the various resistance movements of the Sec-ond World War, all of which would fall into either Foote’s categories of sanctifi cation and designation (see, for example, Adduci et al., 2005).

In the more specifi c Troubles context, sites of violent death have been both sanctifi ed and designated in cities other than Belfast. In Dublin, for example, the sites of bomb explosions in Talbot Street and Sackville Place are marked with memorials, while in London, memorials have been placed in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park at the places where bombs were detonated. In Warrington, a memorial stands in a shopping centre where two boys were killed by a bomb blast in 1993. Although there are some examples in Northern Ireland of the marking of sites of death in this way, they are relatively rare.

It is certainly the case that there is virtually no permanent public commemoration of the Troubles in the centre of Belfast. Although a number of permanent memorials do exist – to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), British Army and victims of ‘Bloody Friday’ in the City Hall, to the UDR in St Anne’s Cathedral, to Ulsterbus and Citybus employees in Laganside Bus Station, and to journalist Martin O’Hagan inside Transport House – they are very low key and not located in public space. The city centre has also witnessed several other public, if temporary, forms of commemoration led by community workers and artists. On the fi rst anniversary of the IRA ceasefi re in 1995, Isobel Hylands, a cross-community worker from Lurgan, used an advertising screen at one of the busiest thoroughfares in the centre to launch her ‘Counting the Cost’ exhibit. Names of all those killed during the confl ict scrolled down the screen continuously throughout the day, causing considerable controversy and raising questions of ownership, equality amongst the dead and the appropriateness of bringing private grief into the public arena. At Easter 1996, art student Hilary Gilligan wrote the names of more than 3300 of the Troubles dead in chalk on the pavement in Royal Avenue, in the heart of the central shopping area. A similar exercise was performed by Christoff Gillen in 2003, when he chalked the names of the Troubles dead on the pavement around the City Hall. In 2007, the same artist attempted to tie cards bearing the names and details of more than 3700 Troubles casualties to the City Hall railings, but he was prevented from completing the exercise by Belfast City Council, who threatened to inform the police that he was defacing council property. Gillen went on to hang the cards from a nearby tree.

The centre of Belfast has been the scene of more than 70 Troubles-related deaths, but none of the sites where these incidents occurred have been marked in any permanent way. Rather than being subject to the processes of either sanctifi cation or designation, the sites of violence have instead been rectifi ed or, less frequently, obliterated. One site of rectifi cation is linked to an infamous incident in March 1972. An IRA bomb, apparently left under a table, was detonated in the Abercorn Restaurant in Castle Lane on a busy Saturday afternoon, killing two women sitting nearby and injuring more than 100 others. Passers-by were thrown across the street by the force of the blast. The bomb provoked outrage: the Belfast Telegraph published on the following Monday

SWITZER & MCDOWELL REDRAWING COGNITIVE MAPS OF CONFLICT 345

bore the headline ‘For God’s sake, what sort of people are you?’ (Belfast Telegraph, 1972a). The restaurant was then, as the article observed: ‘just another boarded-up, bomb-damaged building. The dead and the injured have gone. But the pain … cannot be erased.’ Behind the boards, the building was rectifi ed and the restaurant remained open until the late 1980s. Today, the building still stands, housing a number of retail premises. There is nothing to indicate the past presence of the Abercorn restaurant, or the occurrence of the bombing.

The same is true of the vast majority of sites where Troubles-related violent events have occurred in the city centre. Nothing marks the sites in, for example, Curtis Street, where IRA volunteer William Reid died, or in High Street, where RUC offi cer Sam Todd was killed. Nor is this absent history reserved for sites of individual death: four civil-ians were killed along with two policemen in Donegall Street in 1972 when a car bomb exploded as people fl ed another bomb scare in an adjacent street. The street, reported the Belfast Telegraph, ‘looked like a battlefi eld in seconds. When the smoke and dust from the blast cleared injured people were seen lying in pools of blood on the roadway’ (Lindsay et al., 1972). In each of these cases, the site of death and trauma was returned to something approaching the state it had been in before the violent event occurred.

Other infamous sites have been treated in ways closer to Foote’s category of oblit-eration. Perhaps the most prominent of these sites is that of the former Oxford Street Bus Station. The station was attacked by one of 22 bombs planted by the IRA on 21 July 1972 on what became known as ‘Bloody Friday’. Six people – two soldiers and four Ulsterbus employees – were killed when the bomb explosion turned an everyday place into what a Belfast Telegraph headline dubbed a ‘death terminal’ (Belfast Telegraph, 1972c). ‘Suddenly there was a tremendous bang,’ said one bystander. ‘Smoke was everywhere and I could hear people screaming … There was a horrible smell and a lot of blood on the pavement.’ The same report described how ‘Police and troops carried plastic bags as they went about the gruesome task of collecting the mutilated bodies, parts of which were fl ung up to 30 yards away by the blast.’ More than two decades years later, a policeman described his memories of seeing a human torso lying in the road, a head stuck to a wall, a body partially blown through railings, a ribcage on the roof of a nearby building: ‘I’ve tried to put it at the back of my mind for twenty-fi ve years’ (quoted in Taylor, 1997: 149). Once the damage had been cleared, the Bus Station resumed business, and remained in use until 1996 when the new Laganside Station was opened. Even then, however, the old station remained ‘irretrievably associated with the bombing … in 1972’ (Hill, 1996). The building was subsequently demol-ished and the site became part of the Laganbank development, which, it was hoped, ‘could become the symbol of the way forward in the Province and provide a pleasing and positive environment close to the city centre’ (Fitzsimons, 1995: 78). Thus, the site now houses prominent offi ce buildings occupied by British Telecom, a Hilton Hotel, and the Waterfront Hall, used as a conference and concert venue. No less than fi ve works of art exist on the site, but none references the location’s link to Bloody Friday (Laganside Corporation, 2002). One, entitled ‘Sheep on the Road’ and placed outside the Waterfront Hall, alludes to the past history of part of the site as a sheep and cattle market, while another, ‘Barrel Man’ pays tribute to 100 years of brewing in Belfast. History is therefore not absent from the site; rather, a particular act of extreme violence

MEMORY STUDIES 2(3)346

that is part of that history is left unnarrated, the site at which it occurred unmarked and thus invisible in the urban landscape of present-day Belfast. Yet the fact remains that under its current polished façade, the location has, as Reid observes, ‘its physical foundations on a site of extreme violence’ (Reid, 2005: 505). To return to Foote’s typology, this would appear to be a case of a site initially being rectifi ed and put back into use, but that has, eventually, through redevelopment, been obliterated. The violent aspect of the site’s history has effectively been erased.

The physical memory of the four Citybus employees killed on Bloody Friday has thus been displaced to the new Laganside Station, a building that did not exist until some 20 years after their deaths. They are commemorated, along with several other employees of both Citybus and Ulsterbus, on a ceramic panel inside the station building, unveiled when the new station was opened in May 1996. Although heavy with symbolism ex-plained by an accompanying plaque – the design includes images representative of both Belfast and Northern Ireland, along with a river intended to symbolize ‘the journey from one life to another’ – the panel as a whole comes across more as a piece of art than as a memorial. The names of the dead employees feature only around the edges and it is only on close inspection that it becomes obvious that the panel is a memorial. The two soldiers killed in Oxford Street Bus Station on Bloody Friday are not amongst those commemorated.

The process of displacing memory, evident in the case of the Citybus/Ulsterbus memorial, has also occurred in the cases of other individuals who died in the city centre. Although their deaths are not marked in the centre itself, they are commemorated elsewhere, often more than once. In striking contrast to the unmarked sites of death, these alternative places of commemoration are carefully constructed and often attuned to a particular Troubles narrative. For example, a car park in King Street is the site of death of IRA member Laura Crawford, killed in December 1975 alongside fellow volunteer Paul Fox when a bomb she was carrying went off prematurely. The site of the explosion is unmarked, but Crawford is commemorated elsewhere in the city. She is commemorated alongside three other female IRA members who lost their lives during the Troubles by a street mural in Glenveagh Drive in Lenadoon, a Republican estate in west Belfast. Two of the other IRA volunteers commemorated by the mural died outside Northern Ireland: Mairead Farrell was killed in Gibraltar in May 1988 by an SAS unit whilst on ‘active service’, whilst Patricia Black died in St Alban’s, Hertfordshire in December 1991, in another case of a bomb exploding prematurely. Located in other countries, the places where Farrell and Black died are too distant and inaccessible for local activists to mark, but it is indicative of the nature of space in the city centre, only a few miles from the mural in west Belfast, that the site of Crawford’s death there is equally inaccessible to local memorialists.

THE CHALLENGE OF INDIVIDUAL MEMORIES

Returning to the city centre, the lack of any physical markers on the sites of violence means that the memory of such events remains intangible, a part of the personal

SWITZER & MCDOWELL REDRAWING COGNITIVE MAPS OF CONFLICT 347

memories of individuals. As Dawson (2005) has shown, the internal geographies of individuals take in many unmemorialized sites where traumatic events occurred but that are also part of their everyday lives. These internalized understandings of place ‘are derived from – and complexly related to – the material sites of violence within social environments’ (Dawson, 2005: 156).

When the issue of memorials was debated in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2002, one member spoke about such sites that, although unmarked, remain laden with memories: ‘in Fermanagh and South Tyrone … we can see the crossroads where someone was shot in the back; the tarmac patch where the bomb exploded and where several people were murdered. We cannot forget that’ (Carson, 2002). Violence and remembering violence has a profound effect on how people cognize their surround-ings. For many families, the spaces where their loved ones died during the Troubles are synonymous with pain and suffering. Relatives of those killed by an IRA bomb during an armistice Sunday commemoration in Enniskillen, for example, have found it diffi cult not only to negotiate but to escape the site of the tragedy which occurred in the town’s main street (McDaniel, 1997). Some even take alternative routes through the town in an attempt to avoid it. In this instance the mind produces invisible boundaries that prohibit physical access to the site. While these boundaries are very real for those with a signifi cant attachment to the site, they simply do not exist in the cognitive maps and everyday geographies of others:

My brother was killed in our town centre. I try and avoid that site any time I go in. There are too many memories – we will never get over what happened. Other people are completely oblivious to it. They walk by it, over it, as if it’s nothing … It means nothing to them. (Personal interview, March 2006)

As this statement infers, people interpret their environments differently and this is determined or defi ned by what they remember. The centre of Belfast might be wiped clean for the collective ‘good’ of society, but personal memories of the violence that occurred there remain.

Occasionally, however, internalized understandings of place may gain an outward physical manifestation through the placement of fl owers at particular sites. Each February, for example, fl owers are placed around the base of a tree opposite the Castle Court shopping complex, close to the place where two UDR soldiers were killed by an IRA bomb during the Centre’s construction. The command wire that detonated the 250 lb device had been run through the site the new shopping centre was to occupy (Potter, 2001). Floral tributes of this sort are clearly part of how those people who knew the soldiers attempt to maintain their memory, but the fl owers also reveal the otherwise invisible link between place and personal memory. Their presence also confronts us with the city’s violent past, jarring uncomfortably with the polished modern face of the city centre. Doss (2006: 300) has remarked on the intensely physical nature of these kinds of tributes: they are ‘spaces that must be walked around … places that demand our physical interaction’.

Writing about sites associated with the Berlin Wall, Schlör (2006: 104) suggests that the realization that violent events could have taken place in an apparently innocent

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landscape holds the potential to ‘disrupt the whole area from its friendly cultivated harmlessness’. Such knowledge forces us to confront everyday places and their con-nections to the violent events of the past. Hartig and Dunn (1998: 10) have argued in the context of fatal road accidents that memorials on the sites of sudden death can ‘jolt’ passers-by: ‘these intrusions of the sacred into everyday space … serve as reminders of mortality’. In this case, they also serve as reminders of the violence that has occurred in the city centre. In doing this, these kinds of ephemeral memorials create something of what Till has called ‘open wounds’ that appear ‘out of place’ in today’s urban setting since they are ‘defi ned by (re)surfacing and repressed memories of violent pasts. The open wound asks visitors to confront their feelings of being haunted (or not) by violent national histories that remain present, yet invisible, in the city’ (Till, 2006: 101–2).

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE: MENTAL GEOGRAPHIES AND HISTORIES

Thus far, we have explored the effects that geography can have on the creation and maintenance of memory and forgetting. Despite being the venue for more than 70 deaths and many hundreds of non-fatal acts of violence, the centre of Belfast is devoid of physical evidence of the Troubles, a clear contrast with the extensive memorial landscape present elsewhere within the city’s boundaries. In the fi nal section of this article, we show how geography – here the segregated urban geography of Belfast – may combine with the unfi xed nature of memory to have serious implications for the future development of the memory of the Troubles.

The ‘open wounds’ referred to above point both to the unresolved nature of mem-ory, in this case that of the Troubles, and also to the challenge that memory continues to pose for contemporary society. In the case of Northern Ireland, novelist Jennifer Johnston has written of how ‘witnessing change is a persistent challenge … Within the processes of regeneration, there is an internal mental geography, which lags behind the physical transformation, a reluctance to acknowledge the facelifts’ (cited in Reid, 2005: 498). These cognitive maps, with their linked understandings of which places are safe and unsafe and how each of these categories may be defi ned, are much more resistant to change than the material realities of brick and mortar.

And just as these individual mental geographies can lag behind the contemporary urban landscape, so too may their internal historical narratives. Despite myriad govern-ment efforts, a genuinely inclusive shared future in Northern Ireland remains elusive. Yet the new commercial developments in Belfast city centre do appear to be having some effect: the very fact that memories of the confl ict appear out of place amidst the high-end retailers under the Victoria Centre’s glass dome illustrates the extent to which the centre of Belfast has moved on or, perhaps more appropriately, has been moved on from that past. This is, however, a piecemeal and necessarily incomplete process, since in other areas of the city centre that have not undergone such wholesale change, a more complex picture emerges. This is a picture in which personal memory retains the potential to undermine efforts to induce historical amnesia. Temporary and ephemeral

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memorials, such as the laying of fl owers on the sites of violent events, reveal these hidden, and, for the most part, internalized, geographies and in doing so challenge society more generally to look again at its past.

The kinds of personal memories that result in ‘open wounds’ are, however, clearly time limited, and as these individual memories die with the people who hold them, memory – in the more communal sense of the term – will increasingly come to rely on the historical archive and, more widely, on the spatial and narrative constructs of the commemorative landscape. It is perhaps here that the present-day unevenness of Troubles commemoration will have its most crucial impact. The splintered patterns of commemoration in the areas of Belfast outside the city centre are representative of the current fractured nature of Troubles memory, but they also have a key role in the constitution of future Troubles memories.

In areas outside the city centre, the highly segregated division of space combines with the partisan commemorative landscapes contained within to reproduce simplifi ed understandings of the Troubles, with clearly defi ned categories of victim and perpet-rator. The maxim that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fi ghter’ is scarcely relevant if only one of those stories is being told. The subtleties, complexities and contradictions of recent history, still present in older generations, may be lost on young people growing up largely without direct experience of the Troubles, and whose historic and geographic knowledge of them is drawn from their single-identity surroundings. A study by Smyth et al. (2004) found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that parents introduced the Troubles to their children in ways coloured by their own, and their community’s, interpretations of events, and point to the infl uence this can have: ‘By telling children about their own past experiences and those of their community, parents ensure that their experiences are woven into the narratives available to the next generation’ (Smyth et al., 2004: 28). Like all understandings of the past, these narratives are replete with silences and absent voices, but when the absences are defi ned by single identity readings of recent history the likelihood of them contributing to any kind of future conciliation with members of the ‘other’ community is slim at best. Dealing with Northern Ireland’s troubled past is a key element in the region’s future, but a fractured commemorative landscape, in which each partial history becomes ‘the’ history for its adherents, will not lead to any kind of shared understanding of what occurred.

Where the city centre is concerned, the issues are different although no less poten-tially important. Belfast is Northern Ireland’s capital, its major urban centre and the driver of its economy. Yet if the fi rst of those roles puts the city forward as the obvious site for some kind of commemorative reference to Northern Ireland’s Troubled past, the segregated and sectarianized nature of the second role and, particularly, the need to maintain and encourage the third mitigate against this. Clearly, in one sense, the unmarked places of death and violence in the centre of Belfast do not contribute to the larger single identity narratives worked out elsewhere in the city. But in another sense, their silence is part of a different narrative, one which would seek to deny that the Troubles ever happened. The narrative of the ‘new’ Northern Ireland attempts to downplay the ongoing legacy of the Troubles, including not only controversies relating to the past, but also the ways in which bigotry and sectarianism continue to be

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reproduced and the extent to which ‘the new sites of renewal … are also signifi ers of social unevenness and exclusion’ (Shirlow, 2006: 100). This narrative seeks to present Belfast as a ‘normal’ place, and can be observed in the present city centre, which highlights certain elements of its past – for example the legacies of shipbuilding and Victorian architecture common to other cities in the British Isles – while sidelining other less palatable aspects of the past. The ‘abnormal,’ Northern Ireland-specifi c Troubles are instead relegated to other areas of the city where they continue to exist in the frac-tured and partial ways already referred to. There is something almost schizophrenic about a city that wipes virtually all evidence of the Troubles from its newly polished centre, even as it fi nds that tours of the murals, monuments and painted kerbstones of some of its residential suburbs are among its most popular and distinctive tourist attractions. The deafening silence of the centre of Northern Ireland’s capital on the subject of the 30-year confl ict which killed more than 3500 of the region’s citizens also raises uncomfortable moral questions.

We conclude by returning to the piece by Allen and Kelly with which this article began. They write that ‘the city’s perpetual change defeats the established, intimate com-munities of political association’ (Allen and Kelly, 2003: 9), but the evidence presented here suggests that this statement is only partly true. Belfast, like any other city, is in a state of constant change, but to argue that this change can ‘defeat’ the pre-existing associations between the material city and the communities who live in it is surely wishful thinking. The occasional marking of the ‘lost’ spaces of violence and trauma in the city centre provide evidence of the resilience of people’s mental geographies, but alongside these internalized understandings of place, Belfast’s citizens are develop-ing new ways to interact with their city, incorporating the sites of renewal into their personal geographies. What role the legacy of the Troubles has in the ‘new’ Belfast remains to be seen.

Note

1 Northern Ireland’s existence emanated from the Irish problem, which had dominated the political landscape in Britain for much of the 19th century. The partition of the island occasioned much resentment manifested in waves in successive violence. Unrest was particularly acute in the North, intensifying throughout the 1960s to become the period known colloquially as the Troubles. The divide between Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist, and Republican and Loyalist appeared to characterize the seemingly sectarian nature of the conflict (Tonge 2002: 1). Nationalist ideology, for example, focuses on the unification of Ireland through constitutional means. Republicanism shares this objective but has, at times, embraced an armed struggle. Both ideologies see themselves as politically, culturally and historically Irish. Unionists want to maintain the link with Britain and see themselves as politically, culturally and historically British. Loyalism, which is an inherently working-class ideology, is beginning to push for an independent Northern Ireland and distance itself from Unionism. There is also a religious dimension to this division with many Catholics seeing themselves as Nationalists and many Protestants seeing themselves as Unionists (this is not absolute).

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CATHERINE SWITZER is the author of Unionists and Great War Commemoration in the north of Ireland, 1914–1939 (Irish Academic Press, 2007). Her research interests focus on the commemoration of confl ict, and particularly that of the First World War. Address: [email: catherineswitzer@fastmail.fm]

SARA MCDOWELL is a lecturer in Human Geography in the University of Ulster. Her research interests lie primarily in the relationship between memory, power and territoriality. She has published in Cultural Geographies, the International Journal of Heritage Studies and Gender, Place and Culture, and has recently obtained funding from the Economic and Social Research Council to conduct research into the ways in which the practices and processes of commemoration can be used to perpetuate violence in societies emerging from confl ict. Address: School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Cromore Road, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, BT52 1SA. [email: sp.mcdowell@ulster.ac.uk]