Belfast Peace Wall

About this place

A wall of concrete, sheet steel and mesh rising in places to about eight metres, cutting straight through a quiet residential district of west Belfast for more than half a century. The first of these 'peace lines' went up in 1969, after that year's riots, to keep Catholic nationalist streets apart from Protestant unionist ones, and they were meant to be temporary. Instead they stayed and multiplied. When the Northern Ireland Executive promised in 2013 to remove every one within ten years, the deadline came and went; more than a hundred barriers still stand across Northern Ireland, most of them in Belfast itself. This is not a monument to something finished. It is a wound that has not quite closed. The stretch visitors come for is Cupar Way, running between the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill Road. The Shankill-facing side is covered end to end in murals, messages and signatures in dozens of languages, very likely Arabic among them; your taxi driver will usually hand you a marker so you can add yours. The political murals on both sides are not innocent decoration. Some celebrate men who carried guns, and some are painted over and redone as the mood of the street shifts, so do not expect an agreed version of events. Look for the iron gates in the wall at Lanark Way and Northumberland Street: they open by day and are still shut every night, a small detail that says more about the city than any mural. Seeing the wall is free and needs no booking; it is a public street. From Donegall Square by City Hall it is a 20 to 25 minute walk west, or you can do what almost everyone does and take a black taxi tour: roughly an hour and a half, stopping at the wall and the murals of both communities with a driver who tells the story from the inside. Tours are usually priced per cab rather than per head, around £80 for up to three people and roughly £25 for each extra adult, which works out well for a family that fills the car. Pushchairs are no trouble on the flat pavements, though the content is heavy politics and children under ten will probably drift. One honest word: you are walking between people's homes. Photograph the wall and the murals, not the windows and doors, and come in daylight, especially in winter when the sun is gone before five. Expect the street to be almost empty apart from a taxi or two; this is not a place that gets crowded, it is a place you go to understand. Fold it into a half day with Titanic Belfast or the City Hall gardens rather than giving it a whole one.