Derry hits the right note

Its designation as UK City of Culture 2013 has kick-started a remarkable regeneration of the city, writes Brian O'Connell

WHETHER YOU call it Derry, Londonderry or, as some locals refer to it “Legend Derry”, it’s hard to deny that the UK City of Culture in 2013 is a city undergoing remarkable transformation.

The designation is expected to increase tourist traffic through the city before, during and after the event, and while the long term artistic and cultural legacy of such accolades is uncertain (just ask Corkonians), for visitors, the Derry experience is already much improved.

It was over a decade since I last visited the city, and perhaps late October is not the best time to take a wander through the shopping district or historic areas of the town, given that it rained incessantly. One of the good things about the city, though, is the abundance of affordable and mostly pleasant taxi drivers, who can whisk you from one side of the city to the other and still leave you with change from £5.

In the heart of the city, in Waterloo Place, a new office has opened where the public is encouraged to engage with the City of Culture team. While I sat in the reception, two young girls wandered in with guitars strapped to their backs, asking about getting involved in gigs. An art work by a local artist sits on a shelf and features a stuffed lamb wearing a balaclava. It is positioned so that it is staring almost directly out the window, onto the Guildhall where the Bloody Sunday Inquiry recently completed its work.

Noelle McAlinden, creative advisor with the City of Culture team, organised for me to take a guided tour of the city walls and historic areas. As we waited for a tour guide to arrive, she told me about plans for 2013 and how being “UK” City of Culture prompted healthy debate and discussion within the city. She talked about the regeneration of the city and how tourist numbers are already up. “There has been healthy curiosity from tourists and we’ve noticed the number of overnight stays in the city are up on previous years,” she said.

You can’t have a thriving city culture without regeneration, she argued, and the two themes of the City of Culture year are “purposeful enquiry” and “joyous celebration”, both respecting the past but moving towards the future.

Someone else who has been doing his fair share of celebrating all that’s good about Derry is tour guide Martin McCrossan, who has shown everyone from Russian oligarchs to Hollywood films stars around the city over the past 18 years. For £4, Martin takes visitors on an hour-long walking tour, or, alternatively, for £25 he’ll provide a driven tour of the city’s walls and other areas.

We drove down the Bogside and the Fountain, two areas drawn from opposite traditions, and later took in the old walls of the city, passing houses where notable locals grew up and lived. Martin, a catholic, told me about how he came to marry a protestant woman 28 years earlier, and the tensions this created for their families. He said his parents never quite came to terms with it. When he started his guided tour business, he was the only person providing the service, whereas now many more companies have joined in. “It’s a good sign,” he says, “it means locals are staying here and tourists are coming to visit. It wasn’t always that way.”

Along the way, we stop off for tea in the Tower Hotel, the first new accommodation inside the city’s walls in generations.

Later, I made my way across the River Foyle to Ebrington Barracks, where another aspect of the city’s future is developing. Once this site was where the British Army were housed for close to two centuries, yet now it is part of an ambitious civic and cultural project, linked to the city by a new £13 million Peace Bridge and encompassing concert and conference spaces, art galleries, restaurants, housing and cinemas. Part of the site will be open from next May, but with many of the performance spaces outdoors, I couldn’t help thinking it would limit the range of events, given the Irish climate?

“I don’t accept that,” said project manager Alan Armstrong, “I mean what would Glastonbury be without the rain? The youth don’t care.”

Throughout the weekend, I stayed at Da Vinci’s Hotel complex, near the university and a 20-minute walk from the town centre. The hotel was pretty standard and rooms were clean and modern, although breakfast was very disappointing. One local told me that Friday nights were “cougar night” in the downstairs bar, and while the hotel’s website notes “our bar is no ordinary hotel bar”, I decided to give it a miss.

Instead, I finished my visit not in Derry, but in the village of Bridgend in Inishowen, which is several kilometres across the Border in Co Donegal. There, Donal Doherty of Harrys Bar and Restaurant is leading a quiet food revolution by relying on local produce, clever online marketing and superb food. Donal came home for a wedding a few years ago, whilst living the high life in London, and began helping out in his parent’s bar and restaurant. “I never pictured myself coming back here, but I couldn’t imagine ever leaving now,” he says.

The old part of his parent’s lounge bar remains to one side of the premises, yet in the other part, for €20, award-winning three-course menus are served. Harrys remains true to the traditions of the area, yet is also distinctly modern, and gaining in confidence. It’s not that Donal or his family have forgotten where they’re from, but more that they are realising where they can get to. There’s something in that for Derry to replicate.

* derryvisitor.com

* towerhotelderry.com

* davincishotel.com

* harrys.ie

* irishtourguides.com