The city which lost its heart

On the last Saturday of June 1966, four young barmen coming off work at Belfast's International Hotel went in search of a late-night drink. They found it in the Malvern Arms off the Shankill Road. In the early hours of the following morning, one of the four, Peter Ward, was shot and killed as he left the bar by the side door. Two of his companions were critically wounded. The International barmen were all Catholics, the Shankill Road, as most people know, is a bastion of working class Protestantism. It is easy at this remove to wonder why on earth Peter Ward and his friends should have chosen the Malvern Arms to drink in. The remarkable thing about that time, however, was that their going there was entirely unremarkable. (At least one of the four was on first name terms with the bar owner.)

Political commentator Malachi O'Doherty has written of how, on the day in August 1969 that British troops took to the streets of Belfast, he walked from the bar where he was working on the Shankill to his home at the top of the Falls Road, even stopping once to ask directions when lost; a walk the late Paddy Devlin recounts making on his release from internment for IRA membership at the end of the second World War. On the other side, my own father, a Protestant, was still drinking in bars on the Falls as late as spring 1971.

All of which might lead you reasonably to conclude that, rather than the violence of the last years being the inevitable consequence of a divided city, Belfast is the profoundly divided city it is today because of the violence.

Of course, there have always been areas here which are predominantly (even exclusively) Protestant or Catholic - a situation greatly exacerbated by the massive population influx which accompanied the city's rapid industrialisation in the 19th century. Immigrants from the country tended to cluster around their respective churches. This explains why most of the famous working class Protestant areas are Church of Ireland and not Presbyterian as popularly supposed. A city once noted for its religious tolerance quickly became a by-word for bigotry and mayhem.

Through all the riots that flared periodically into our own century, however, the primary lines of communication, that is the streets themselves, remained open. The unique legacy of our own era's Troubles is that many of those lines are now not only closed, but permanently severed.

More depressing than any of Belfast's crude peace-lines is the subtle segregation of the newer housing developments, with built-in buffer zones between them and other, religiously opposed, developments. A fence or a wall might, in time, be pulled down. It is hard to know how you go about dismantling a four-lane carriageway or a light industrial estate.

I recently drove a Canadian cousin around the Woodvale Road, where my mother's family come from. Some of my earliest memories are of walking from the Woodvale across the Crumlin Road and through Ardoyne to visit relatives on the Oldpark, but driving with my cousin around the Woodvale's side streets I was soon lost in a one-way system that seemed to throw up a bigger, more militaristic mural at every turn. I had spent a significant portion of my childhood around here, but now I was disoriented and not a little scared. I have never seen so many cul-de-sacs.

Nor is this turning inwards merely architectural. More and more imagination seems to be expended on drawing ever finer distinctions between the city's constituent parts. Many Belfast people, for instance, will tell you that they have no recollection of a district known as "the Lower Ormeau". If anything this obsession has become more pronounced since the beginning of our long and tortuous peace process. Laudable aims such as self-empowerment and self-confidence appear at times to have been pursued without much in the way of self-scrutiny or self-criticism. All too often our minutely defined communities can present to their nearest neighbours at best a smug, at worst a hostile face.

A city is, or ought to be, a place of mixture and exchange. Confronted with the kind of calculated division just described, the very least a city needs is an open, permissive centre into which citizens can, if they wish, escape, night as well as day. Infamously, by the mid 1970s Belfast's non-sectarian city centre had shrunk to an inner ring, a few hundred yards in diameter, surrounded by gates which were locked at 9 p.m. Many of the victims of the murder gangs were literally picked off as they walked around the circumference. If the centre is the city's heart, Belfast's back then was barely beating.

Then again, if there is one thing greater than a city's resilience, it is its sheer longevity. What can, measured against the average human life-span, feel like long years of near death, may prove in the longer term to be nothing more serious than the city holding its breath. The day before yesterday, I had to point out to a writer friend - at 30, only eight years my junior - where exactly the security gates had been.

In the centre, at any rate, Belfast has been tackling the reality and the image of its darker days for the best part of 20 years. Most importantly, it has expanded the perimeter of the neutral centre. Indeed one of our newest bars, aptly named (though not for its decor or ambience) the Edge, takes that centre to its easternmost limit, with a deck practically overhanging the river Lagan, on the far bank of which the Sirocco Works, once one of the giants of Belfast industry, awaits its own leisure makeover.

LOVE it or loathe it (myself, I'm undecided: put me, for the minute, in the loave camp), the Laganside development, of which the Edge is a part, has changed the character of Belfast city centre and no element more so than the Waterfront concert hall, which now dramatically closes the vista as you look past the Royal Courts of Justice from the City Hall. Though it has not yet - and may never - become the "People's Palace" its champions had hoped it would, the Waterfront has provided a new cultural focus, if not through its programme then at the very least through the events which take place in the pedestrianised precinct which surrounds it.

High on my list of things I thought I'd never live to see has got to be this summer's open-air gig there by Dogstar. That's Dogstar as in Keanu-Reeves-on-bass Dogstar. It's fashionable, I know, to knock Keanu's rock'n'roll ambitions (fashionable, and I have to say, having stood through the hour-long Dogstar set, justifiable), but some part of me thought all of us in the audience had come a long way, metaphorically speaking, to be standing in a car park on the site of the old Oxford Street bus station, watching one of the 1990s biggest movie stars.

Well, you didn't think anyone was looking at the rest of the band, did you? In fact, though, the most exhilarating and visually stimulating part of that particular day for me had finished hours before Dogstar took the stage, when the Belfast Carnival stopped traffic for an hour on its passage through the centre of town. Now, higher even than Keanu in a car park on that list of things I thought I'd never see is hundreds of Northern Irish people, young and not-so, male and female, in feathers and face paint (and sometimes little more) dancing the salsa in Royal Avenue. Mind you, it strikes me as appropriate that, in a city where large numbers of people like nothing better than to process down the middle of the road, the one genuinely cross-community addition to the cultural calendar since the ceasefires should be a street parade; appropriate too that from its inception, the carnival has sashayed its way to the Waterfront precinct, bypassing the more traditional, but politically loaded, rallying point in front of the City Hall.

Belfast lost more than the life of one its citizens the night the International barmen were gunned down outside the Malvern Arms. Thirty-three years on, there is still much to recover. We may as well set our sights high. After all, in the words of the great urban historian Lewis Mumford, the city is the "symbol of the possible. Utopia is part of its constitution". Or, in the words of John Lydon, Belfast: "Open up".

Glenn Patterson's most recent novel, The International, is based around the murder of Peter Ward in the International Hotel and is published by Anchor.

The Spirit of the City, a city-wide street celebration, takes place around Belfast today and tomorrow