Fictional Ulster: In Development

I'm almost done with Version One of Fictional Ulster, a map of places created by writers. Thank you to Patricia Craig who told me about a few locations I might not have discovered otherwise. Patricia, who edited The Ulster Anthology, probably knows more about Ulster literature than anyone else alive. She has read all the bad and forgotten stuff as well, which is useful as fame or literary quality play no part in getting on the Fictional Ulster map.

A preview, from Mid-Ulster

Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography

I am delighted that The Map of Connections has been included in Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography by Colin Graham. This is a substantial and authoritative publication which, interestingly, looks at both gallery photography and journalistic work from Belfast archives.

There will be a public lecture by publication's author on 7 June from 12noon to 1pm in the MAC, Belfast. Many photographs featured in the book are currently on show there.

The book was published this month.

I like Graham's reading of The Map of Connections. He wonders if the border's connection points might be its "truest existence". That a place might be best seen through its contradictions was something I often considered when developing the map.

See The Map of Connections here. This page also features other maps I have created.

The Model City

Forum for Alternative Belfast is a community interest company that campaigns for a better connected built environment in Belfast. On the 2nd of May an exhibition showcasing their work opens in The Golden Thread Gallery. The show features a three dimensional model of Belfast's centre.

Making the model city.

Four coats of acrylic were required, then a high-viscosity top-coat.

In the model, vacant sites will be highlighted in and proposals made for how these sits could be converted and made to live again. Painting the mini buildings was a time consuming job. Forum for Alternative Belfast asked for volunteers to help them with it. I assisted one day and it was fascinating to see the model in development.

The exhibition will run until June 8th. It will be accompanied by a public talks. Go to The Golden Thread Gallery's website for details.

To the Waters and the Wild

CROW (City Right of Way) is a collaboration between artists Mike Hogg and Aisling O'Beirn. They organise monthly walks, usually in areas of Belfast. The walks are free and open to anyone. Participants often suggest the routes or they are developed in collaboration with other organisations. This month I joined one of their walks, heading away from Strandmillis along the Lagan's towpath. About 20 people formed our party, a good percentage of them being children. They youngsters enjoyed the snow and, luckily, none of them fell in the river. We went as far as a wooden area in Belvoir Park, the oaks there are said to be the oldest in Belfast.

The route

Waiting for the kids to catch up

Among the oaks, Justin Nicholl (of Grow, a North Belfast community garden cooperative) identified an abundance of wild garlic. I brought some home and added it to my dinner.

Links: CROW (City Right of Way) and Grow Community Garden.

Ulster's Diamonds

I grew up near Donegal Town. Locals always called the open area in the middle of the town The Diamond. It was mainly used for car parking and was more of a triangle than a diamond. Streets ran from three corners

 

A map of Donegal Town from 1901.

 

 Coleraine, 1611.

Lately I've learned that there are many other town diamonds in Ulster. The centre of Ulster's plantation towns were usually given that name. The outer limits of Coleraine might vaguely suggest a diamond but its central zone, the part that is actually called The Diamond, is a rectangle. This map from 1611 shows it well. Why did the term diamond come into use?

 

Postcard of Coleraine.

Diamonds were the town's market areas and markets were central to the Plantation project. It was believed that control, regulation and commerce would help build a new society. I wonder if the hard, angular associations of the word diamond appealed, in some fundamental way, to the designers of the plantation? Still now, I feel, the word diamond suggests a nexus, lines and angles meeting in one unbreakable centre. Such a solid word was bound to appeal to those wishing to anchor themselves into the ground.

The Star Factory

I heard Iain Sinclair on BBC Radio 4 lately given his personal view of the term psychogeography. Basically, psychogeography was whatever you wanted it to be. This got me wondering if there is an official definition of the term. As a concept, it has been around longer than one might expect. It seems to have its roots in 1950’s France. The theorist, writer and filmmaker Guy Debord said psychogeography was: "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals."

This concern with precision and laws is not usually found among those who would define psychogeography today. The contemporary trend is it towards playfulness, inventiveness. Most are happy to accept as psychogeography almost any creative effort that makes us look at our surroundings afresh. One writer suggests that to play psychogeographer you could open up a street map … “place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out in the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour.”

Oregon - Orient - Orkey - Palestine - Paris.

Whatever the definition, Ciaran Carson’s book The Star Factory is a psychogeography of Belfast. One observation I particularly enjoy in the book is about the index of street names accompanying a map or atlas. Carson points out some of the strange juxtapositions that indexing creates for Belfast. Places far apart in the solid material of the city are thrown together and new connections spark in the mind “like the way we could hear the roar of the crowd at an international fixture in far-off Windsor Park.”

Carson goes on:

... streets named after places form exotic junctures not to be found on the map of the Empire: Balkan and Ballarat, Cambria and Cambrigde, Carlisle and Carlow, Lisbon and Lisburn, and so on, though Madras and Madrid, till we eventually arrive, by way of Yukon, at the isles of Zetland, whereupon we fall off the margins of the city.

Reclaim the Westlink

Forum for Alternative Belfast is a Community Interest Company that campaigns for a better and a more humane built environment in Belfast. One of their current projects is attempting to improve the Divis Link intersection. This is currently a patch that really lets you know this city is for cars, brutally excluding any other mode of getting around. "It is important that people in the city challenge the design of these over-scaled junctions that disempower the walker and the cyclist," says the Forum.


From the website of Forum for Alternative Belfast.

This diagram of the existing (blue) and proposed (yellow) pavements shows the Forum's proposal of what space could be reclaimed at the junction, helping to make it walkable and a living link between the west and the city centre. This is just a small part of their proposal, see the Forum for Alternative Belfast website for more.