Wednesday August 13
A first tour of the peace lines.
The Peace Lines are walls. Tall, off-white walls with green mesh fences above. Old concrete specked with marker and acrylic and chipped plaster and traces of petrol burns. The Peace lines are high, higher than I'd imagined them; with the upper fencing they are well over twenty-five feet, three storeys in two dimensions.
I spent most of the afternoon around the wall that runs the length of Cupar street on the Shankill side and Bombay street (among others) on the Falls side. The Cupar side of the wall runs along a roadway and gives onto another tall fence. It has a feel of intense desolation, a space severed from its surroundings. On the Falls side, the houses back right up to the wall, it looms. There are steel enclosures built over the rear yards of the closest rows of flats like strange penitentiary solariums.
Tomorrow I am going back, to listen and hopefully to talk, to get a bit of an oral sense of life in the shadow of this incredible piece of martial architecture.
3 comments:
Thank you for that interesting tidbit. I am heading there soon with a class from Colorado. Do you have any suggestions on good resources to research the Shankill road and Fall road area?
Your blog is seriously under commented. Fine work, and very intriguing. I am working on a photojournalism project of the Peace Lines and would welcome any information you may be willing to offer. Thank You for you work, and writing.
dennisjmann@gmail.com
also look me up on FB, Irish American Awareness
I'm doing research for a documentary TV series and we'd very much like to include a segment about the Peace Walls. I'm gathering stories, speaking with people from the Belfast Interface Project and others, but I'm wondering you had an interest in chatting about this for a moment.
If so, please reach out: JMNetek@gmail.com
- Jason
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