Sailortown

As if digging a few dozen holes and pulling out yards of ivy wasn’t enough fun, I then walked one hour into the city yesterday so I could go on a two-hour walking tour at 4 p.m. I must be mad.

The walking tour was to learn about historic Belfast. For instance, the entries--narrow passageways--connected what is now High Street to the heart of the city. Back then, High Street was the River Farset, since moved into culverts underground. Barrow boys used to unload cargo from boats on the river and push their barrows through the entries to Cornmarket Square, Linenhall, potteries, and other historic hotspots.

My tour guide was an Englishman who came here in 1993 to attend Queen’s. He didn’t want to live with all the students in South Belfast--an academic bubble. So he lived in Sailortown, historically an area of tenements where dockworkers lived. In the late 1960s, highway overpasses were built through Sailortown and much of the housing was destroyed. But he got to know the former residents because they still go to the bars that remain in Sailortown, like The American Bar, where the tour ended.

He said Sailortown was one of the most liberal areas of the city, where Catholics and Protestants lived together. The people who lived there had traveled the world and welcomed people from around the world to live among them. It was very cosmopolitan and tolerant, the tour guide said. When the neighbourhood was destroyed--just as the Troubles kicked off--the people who had lived in an integrated, worldly community were segregated into either predominantly Catholic or Protestant neighbourhoods. That must have been a very tough adjustment--moving from the world-is-your-oyster mentality of Sailortown to the blinkered, xenophobic world of a freshly built sectarian estate.
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