If the walls could talk

Roaring Bess stands mute at the lip of Derry's walls. The cannon presented to the city for its defence and used during the siege of 1690, looks towards the Foyle. From the double bastion in which it is housed, the view of the Bogside and the Creggan is impressive. Free Derry corner is visible, as is the Long Tower Church and, a mere matter of yards away, St Augustine's Church of Ireland stands within the shadow of stone. The present church dates back to 1871 but the site has religious connections going back to the 13th century. St Augustine's still boasts a congregation despite the city's troubled past. Mute, too, stands First Derry Primary School, a school without pupils for too long. That is soon to change, however. Thanks to a new initiative, funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to the tune of £1.1 million and £500,000 from other funders, the school is soon to be a new home to the Verbal Arts Centre. Building work begins this month and the completed centre should be opened within a year and in time for the millennium festivities.

The Verbal Arts Centre has been in existence since 1992, but it only has the use of a few spartan rooms on the top floor of the Cathedral School. The centre's director, Sam Burnside, believes that the necessity for such a centre is paramount: "Essentially, I felt in 1992 that we had things like music centres and technology centres but we didn't have one devoted to the verbal arts and that seemed to me then and still seems to me to be one of Ireland's greatest treasures - stories, mythologies, the legends, the jokes, the humour on the one hand and, on the other hand, the written literature."

It is a tradition which Burnside believes to be undervalued and underfunded. For him there are four main components to the verbal arts which are "the very basic cornerstones of communication: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Those four skill areas encompass all the rest - the singing voice, the speaking voice. We try to integrate that in a way that nobody else really does. Other people focus on literature or on singing or whatever. But I think that those four aspects are linked together.

"Out of that link comes the need to encourage writing; then you must encourage the creative imagination. The creative imagination, it seems to me, is the key to a new civic order on this island. If people cannot envisage or imagine a different future or a different society we cannot achieve it."

Imaginative ideas which are not implemented are not fruitful, however, says Burnside. He argues that imagination must be exercised in order to achieve its full potential: "We've got to imagine and then share that vision with others. While you're being spoken to, you have to listen. One of the characteristics of Ulster people is that we're not very good at listening. Yet that is one of the skills associated with verbal arts."

Combining those skills will "create this imaginative energetic opening in the future," he says. Another aspect of the verbal arts which is central to the centre's work is the recognition and exploration of the languages of the North. In this context Burnside speaks of the importance of "the Irish language, the Ulster Scots contribution, the mainstream English contribution and how they are all linked together in what Hewitt called "the tangled knot": "They are not separate; they don't have separate existences; they are all united and they all enrich each other and we are all heirs to them. We should respect our differences but we should celebrate where those things come together and unite us".

Despite the urgency of Burnside's vision, the centre has not been given the kind of official recognition which he would wish. "Steady and sustained sympathy and empathy," he says, have been the centre's main reception over the last few years. He does however note that the "the term `verbal arts' is beginning to seep through into official documents."

The quality of writing in the north-west is a resource the centre is quick to highlight. Peadar O'Donnell and Patrick MacGill represent a distinctive prose tradition in Donegal, Derry City's natural hinterland; the Nobel prizewinning poet, Seamus Heaney, was educated in the city, as were the critic Seamus Deane and the dramatist Brian Friel. The novelist and dramatist Jennifer Johnston still lives in the city. In addition, one of the island's finest poets, Cathal O Searcaigh, lives and works in the Donegal Gaeltacht. He has read in the centre and has spoken of the influence of the poet Robbie Burns on his own work; another poet whose work informs the literary heritage of the north-west.

O Searcaigh's father, returning from seasonal work in Scotland, would recite Burns to his son. It is a richly symbolic mixture of Irish and Scots. The symbolism is made all the more fascinating by the fact that this young, gay native speaker is probably one of the last heirs of a truly verbal tradition, a tradition which has passed into oblivion in much of the North. The new site too is pregnant with symbolism. "The school has roots which go back to the mid 1700s when it was the singing school attached to the First Presbyterian Church on the walls and it was called `the blue coat school'. The boys wore blue coats which they got as payment for singing in the choir. The school has a 200 year association with the singing voice and education on the walls. When the school closed down that was in danger of being lost, but we aim to revitalise that and carry on that tradition of education, learning, of singing plus all the other arts, of poetry readings, of debates," says Burnside.

The new centre will include a debating chamber for people from different backgrounds to savour and enjoy public debate. There will also be a library room and an exhibition/performance space. A coffee house is also planned, as is a writer's studio, which will offer sanctuary to a writer-in-residence. It is pleasing to think that the cameras and listening devices which bristle above Derry's walls will soon be in competition (and, hopefully) surpassed-in keenness by more productive human antennae.

Going by its past record, the centre will have little difficulty in finding a tenant for its modern garret. Writers who have contributed to the centre's development have included Paula Meehan, Carol Rumens and Anne Dunlop. Irish-language literature has been represented by the novelist Seamus Mac Annaidh and poet Greagoir O Duill. The artist Neil Shawcross has worked on murals in the centre. One, a celebration of VE Day in Derry, hangs proudly on a wall within the centre.

Burnside plans in hope: "I regard a public building like the new Verbal Arts Centre as both a utility and a symbol: a utility insofar as it provides shelter and resources to facilitate and enable creative, imaginative work to take place and for teaching and learning to occur; a symbol insofar as it is a statement that we continue to honour the tradition of education and arts activity that it sheltered, a statement that we have a profound belief in the ability of the creative imagination to carry us forward into a better future."