Re-Writings to Disrupt the Hegemonic Line
Introduction
Standing in front of the wall presents a peculiar condition of sidedness. You make note of the discoloration in the concrete, the bend of the metal panel. You realize the squares of sky framed through the mesh fence up at the top is part of the same sky on this side of the wall, your side of the wall, but unless you can magically phase through the obstruction before you, you cannot stand under thatsky. The wall is a record of the end of one territory and the beginning of another. Instinctually you are aware of the “back” side of the wall, even without a need to see it. But does the concrete that has grown mildewy, the metal that has started to rust, have counterparts on the other side? Is there continuity across the wall as there is along its length? Is there another person staring at this segment of the wall, trying to make sense of it themselves? Inherently, the wall divides that which you can see from that which you imagine to be on the other side.
|
|
|
The Cupar Way Peace Wall is one of many “Peace Walls” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, remnants of a conflict called “The Troubles”. This conflict, however, was deemed “ended” in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. These walls, sometimes made of concrete and steel like at Cupar Way and other times in brick or wire or stone, divide neighborhoods and stand today as records of the invisible divide that pre-dated the walls themselves.
The mode of architectural practice has always been mark-making, whether on paper or on land. This act of recording is not a benign act. Through transcription, mark-making, and memorialization, there is always that which is excluded. The stories that are captured and the truths that are propagated all stem from that which we may see and touch.
The Peace Walls of Belfast, Northern Ireland are an artifact of a community still grappling with its post-colonial potential. Northern Ireland, currently recognized as part of the United Kingdom, has been a hot-bed of conflict surrounding views regarding its future. Political difference among the population had married with religious difference, necessitating intervention from the British Army in 1969 to respond to what would eventually be dubbed “The Troubles”. “The Troubles” were more violent than its name lets on; a conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the British Army defined by separatist insurgency and counterinsurgency, The Troubles involved various paramilitary groups and their splintered factions vying for Belfast and Northern Ireland to join a unified Ireland. Their means and methods included protests, hunger strikes, and bombings. The Republican forces were met with violence in response, the British Army deploying water hoses, rubber bullets, and gas canisters. The situation steadily worsened, leading to conflicts between political opponents and neighbors alike. The first “Peace Wall” was formed by a row of soldiers, linking arms to divide Loyalist and Republican crowds.[1] From 1969 to as recently as 2007[2], the British Army ossified these divisions by building walls across the city of Belfast to physically divide neighborhoods already divided across lines political (Republican, Loyalist) and religious (Catholic, Protestant). Although The Troubles officially ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, tensions flare between communities even today.[3] The Peace Walls, over 50 of them still standing, are physical manifestations of the tension, fear, and violence still in the air around the city.
Figure 5: Map of Peace Wall Locations (red) in Belfast. Drawing by author.
|
Figure 6.1: Palisade Fence. Image by author. |
|
|
Figure 6.3: Steel Fence. Image by author. |
Figure 6.4: Wall with Steel Fence. Image by author. |
 Figure 6.5: Wall with Fence. Image by author. |
Figure 6.6: Mesh Fence. Image by author. |
|
Figure 6.7: Concrete Buffer with Fence. Image by author. |
Figure 6.8: Wall with Mesh Fence. Image by author. |
|
Figure 6.9: Brick Wall. Image by author. |
Figure 6.10: Wall with Gate. Image by author. |
These walls are discontinuous and vary in material, dimension, and context (Figures 5 and 6.1-6.11). Some walls are made of brick with barbed wire or steel over top like on Bryson Street; some are wire mesh fences like the one along Donegall Pass; others are composites of concrete, steel, and wire mesh as is the one on Cupar Street. Some walls are 15 feet tall and wind through neighborhoods, bisecting backyards as on Bryson Street; some have the appearance of property fences and line lawns on Donegall Pass; others tower over residential areas, separating them from commercial streets like on Cupar Way.
|
Figure 7: Bryson Street Peace Wall. Image by Author |
Figure 8: Cupar Way Peace Wall. Image by Author. |
Figure 9: Peace Wall on Donegall Street. Image by Author.
Without witnessing interactions between the people the walls are meant to separate, the walls seem banal and without deeper purpose. Some are overlooked, mistaken as simply a property wall or highway barrier, while others lead the unfamiliar to believe they have somehow encroached onto a military base. While the Peace Walls literally separate areas of Belfast from each other, they effectively splinter the composite idea of Belfast into many smaller Belfasts of different tones, climates, postures, and populations. Walls, or “wall-ing”, are inherently spatial; walls divide heres and theres, and as Michel de Certeau would suggest, “… It is the partition of space that structures it.”[4] The creation of borders and edges within the larger city structure not only the physical city, but the understandings of the city itself. The walls, in the lived experience of the citizens of Belfast, become indices of a conflict they cannot see in the moment but know through a tangible and violent confirmation of a history better left behind.
|
Figure 10: Springfield Road Peace Wall. Image by Author. |
Figure 11: Alley between two homes, one side fenced, the other hosting a Peace Wall. Image by Author. |
However, this history, and the walls that carry them, only appear so violent, resilient, and immovable insofar as we read their material record as it has always been assumed to be and not as it is now. Through their construction in different contexts, the walls have morphed and changed over time, destabilizing what we assume to be a rigid and unchanging element: the wall. In the following text, I will investigate the transfigurement (visible, perceived, and imagined) of the Cupar Way Peace Wall, illustrated in Figure 13. We can read the subtle shifts of the wall as evidence of a daily habit of re-writing that does not erase but appends a history that is unfolding.
Figure 12: Cupar Way Peace Wall, Conway Street side. Image by Author.
Figure 13: Cupar Way Peace Wall. Image by Author.
We will rely on our tools of drawing to communicate the potentialities of the walls and their interactions with the contexts abutting them. It is in this act of drawing that we may start to suggest the architectural space that opens up due to discrepancies and misalignments, ultimately suggesting a greater connectivity between either side of a given wall. The shifting relations between either side will help identify the variability of that which is assumed to be fixed. For this exercise, let us work our way from the exterior (plan) to the interior (section).
In Plan
A map from 1963 (Figure 14) shows Cupar Street (now Cupar Way) and the development that grew from and along it. As we shift from map (1963) to satellite (2022), it is immediately clear that progress in the area has resulted in the roads being repaved and streets and alleys reconfiguring to branch off as necessary. The Cupar Way Peace Wall, the first wall to be built in Belfast, was erected in 1969 as a series of pickets with barbed wire running between them.[5] Eventually, this was fortified as a concrete wall, then again as one with corrugated metal paneling above, then once more to add a wire mesh fence on top. This morphological development was coupled with oscillations in plan, the Wall reforming itself to match repaved roads and the construction of parks or houses on either side. The continual retracing of the plan of the Cupar Way Peace Wall as it changed over time will show that the wall shifts in response to the happenings on either side; the initial threshold is lost (Figure 16).[6]
|
Figure 14: 1963 Map |
|
Figure 17: Overlay of Cupar Way Peace Wall footprint, as seen from Satellite view. Image by author.
Through the overlay of the yearly changes highlighted above, Figure 17 reveals the intensive potential of the wall itself showing how the wall shifts, contingently, in accordance with the larger urban network in ways that project how a future state of the wall could be present, but yet to be.[7] This implied variability allows us to imagine the extensions, permutations, and manipulations the wall is awaiting (Figure 18). Furthermore, this act of retracing introduces uncertainty regarding the authority of any given tracing; the “original” has been overwritten, but can one argue that the current state, perhaps awaiting another re-write, is more attuned than the previous? How can one determine if the current “line” is more indicative of or speaks more to the imagined or perceived division between incompatible communities? The walls, sometimes concrete, sometimes steel or brick, are porous, soft, and malleable. This new understanding of the wall presents a prime surface to serve as a substrate to record through.
Figure 18: Translation of overlay into a speculative spatial expansion of the Cupar Way Peace Wall. Image by author.
In Section
Turning now to the notion of the interiority of the wall and how we may transmit through and from the wall, we will again use architectural representation, focusing on our method of communicating thickness, solidity, and structure. This is typically communicated through the “Section” drawing. While the section drawing may gesture to the interiority of the subject, the material that comprises this interior is often reduced to a shorthand: poché (a hatch or colored fill).
While shifts in plan may work towards overwriting, in some instances quite literally, the previous version of the wall, the presence of these changes may be imperceptible; this is primarily accessed through a “bird’s eye” view, inaccessible to one experiencing the wall along its length. However, the inflection of the wall perpendicular to its face is visible on a daily basis. The Peace Walls of Belfast have become a tourist attraction, not for history buffs around the world, but for those seeking a glimpse of the vibrant art culture of the city. The walls boast murals, graffiti, posters and signage from artists, residents, tourists, and like-minded individuals.
|
Figure 19: Artist “goodrobottt” works on his mural on the Cupar Way Peace Wall. Image by Author. |
Figure 20: Tourists in front of the Cupar Way Peace Wall murals. Image by Author. |
The daily accumulations and secretions of this social “stuff” slowly thicken the wall. This thickening, however, does not create further distance between the two sides facing the wall but rather creates a shared tableau worth wandering across and between to review. The surface of the wall becomes a record for transcribing the happenings pertinent to those staring at it. The act of over-writing, literally in this instance, reclaims the area of the wall at a time-scale much closer than those changes that occur in plan. While the lines that delineate the bounds of objects exist between objects, it is itself a space in which the objects are continuously related to one another through a mutual contacting of edges and a growing “sympathetic relation”.[8] This “sympathetic relation” is literally brought to the surface through the creative acts that take place upon the wall.
The acts that occur against the backdrop of either elevation of the Peace Wall use similar means to speak to a similar lived experience. Take, for example, two murals sited on the Cupar Way Peace Wall. The mural in Figure 21 creates relationships between Belfast with other contexts, Palestine and Israel, or Berlin, that have reckoned with similarly divided conditions. The mural uses black vertical bars of varying thickness to divide the panels, fracturing one image into many, echoing the discontinuity caused by the wall that doubles as its own canvas. Just on the opposite side of the wall on Bombay Street, the Clonard Martyrs Memorial Garden (Figure 22) remembers those who were killed in a raid of that very street. The works on both sides speak both literally and figuratively to loss, fear, insecurity and distance. It is only when they are sought out in sequence that one may witness this convergence of narrative, in effect eroding the solidity of the wall that stands between them.
|
Figure 21: Mural on Cupar Way. Image by Author |
Figure 22: Mural on Bombay Street (Clonard Martyrs Memorial Garden). Image by Author. |
Imagining the daily additions and revisions made to the surface of the wall, understood as a collective notebook, the wall is comprised of sedimented layers that present an immediate history. In the images below, one can understand not only the wall’s role as a canvas for local artists, but also how this may couple with a material imagination of the wall to asserts its presence across greater distances than its literal instantiation.
Figure 23: Accumulations and Secretions of Social Stuff. Drawing by author.
Looking at the Cupar Way Peace Wall specifically, we can understand it first as an object comprised of various materials. These materials can be represented graphically, and based on their material properties, we ascribe them a certain poché—however, what was once meant to denote solidity now shows objects that have varied relationships or contact with their context, ranging from being “at hand” and rooted in place, to “absent” and void. This reading of poché suggests the wall’s variability in the physical space of Belfast, allowing it to distend and occupy greater volumes. Parts of the walls that are elevated higher signal outwardly a presence beyond the physical wall; they become a symbol of the wall, and a landmark which orients passersby. The porosity of their material presents context alongside object; the wall exists with a backdrop and becomes a backdrop itself. This porosity furthers the transportive quality of the “sign”. Thus, the wall is not limited to its physical footprint. This study is explored in the following series of drawings.
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 24: A series of drawings re-contextualizing the Cupar Way Peace Wall with a revised material poche imaginary. Drawing by the author.
Figure 25: The wall distends in response to vantage points, exposures, and areas of engagement. Image by the author.
The materialized connections imply poché; the more dense the connections, the more the volume of the In-Between is made visible. However, this logic starts to deconstruct notions of solidity within the construction of this edge or perceived divider. The more “solid” the edge presents itself, e.g. a thicker poché, the more connections it implies as the density rendered in the poché. If this edge is “solid”, it boasts greater connectivity to the “other side”, thus making it “less solid”. This understanding transforms this endeavor into a graphical/representational project. The means and conventions of representing these barriers, walls, and edges simultaneously construct divisions physically and divide constructions mentally.
So, the walls which were previously observed to be made of bricks, wire, or steel, are rather comprised of the sympathetic relations between concurrent narratives of fear, displacement, identity, and resolve. These narratives are inherited through generations, occupying minds and framing habits and rituals, shifting behaviors and the movements of bodies in space. The walls’ ability to frame behavior projects into products of culture, surfacing again in poetry and literature.
In Context
Figure 26: Colette Bryce, “Line”.[9]
Multiple generations of Northern Irish have grown up alongside the shifts, inflections, and distensions of the walls, however, the walls have appeared rigid in place due to their recording of The Troubles and perpetuation of this history. The true reach of the Peace Walls echo through to products of culture. In studying the poetry of Northern Ireland, the presence of the walls is foregrounded as they become devices that structure spatial understandings of Belfast, enabling authors to order the world of their vignettes and orient their narratives along this urbanity. In Colette Bryce’s “Line”, the wall is immaterial, “drawn in the voice of [her] mother”.[10] The directive offered by her mother, “not past Breslin’s, don’t step over.” creates a physical reality and border condition where one may not have previously existed. The perceived edge of the territory is recorded in this way and perpetuated by the framing of habits around this understanding of the wall or line.
This recollection illustrates an idea of Belfast diverging from perhaps what had been mapped at the time, spaces assumed to be permeable are contradictorily made inaccessible through habit. The structuring of space, as de Certeau had revealed, occurs here because it has been delineated, made distinct from that which it is not.[11]While this is true for the physical reality of Belfast, divided by the Peace Walls, it is even further subdivided by mental acknowledgement of the perceived influence, or thickness, of these dividers.
We began our discussion with mention of the sidedness of the walls. When the walls are experienced, they seem to project a side: either Catholic or Protestant; Republican or Loyalist. The elevations of the walls suggest a uniform distance from the other side. However, unfurling the two sides and placing them in context allows us to visualize the varying thickness of what was previously drawn as a line of uniform thickness.
Figure 27: Peace Wall elevations. Image by author.
Figure 28: Peace Wall elevations, unrolled. Drawing by author.
This mode of re-drawing begins to suggest the relationships between either side of a given Peace Wall, dictated perhaps by and through associations and habits, and so, assists in the deconstruction of the strictly sided understanding of walls, questioning the relational thickness that is present between the two faces of the walls and the certitude of any such record of division. This distance grows and shrinks in relation to the activities of either side, made apparent also through our previous discussion of shared narratives.
In Conclusion
Ireland and Northern Ireland have a long tradition of storytelling, crafting folkloric narratives that explain phenomena such as those of “Thin Places”, spaces where the distance between realms, here and the “other world”, are less than typically may be the case. These special zones exist due to some facet of the land itself. I would argue that the city of Belfast is host to many such places, each Peace Wall offering people passage to the “other world”, in this case, being the other side or perspective.
The walls thickening as a result of daily habits does not correspond with greater distance between the two sides the walls are meant to separate but rather provide opportunities for the individual and collective to subvert this infrastructure and use it as a record of the story they hope to tell and the connections they hope to make.
Figure 29: The variability of what is assumed to be a uniform thickness of the wall is brought about through the interactions between each face of the wall and its immediate context. Image by the author.
As these dividers shift in plan and thicken in section, it permeates a social understanding of distance, perceived but immaterial. The ever-changing record of The Troubles, reformation of state, attestation to struggle, all point to each other. As Peter Eisenman describes in his Foreword to Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis:
“… architecture is about the invisible. It is about clues that only architects can see… We can experience the stressed space between what we expect to be there and what is there. In the physical world, things are hidden in plain sight.”[12]
These invisible forces are ever present within the constructions of walls, both physical and imagined. Even the root cause of these walls stem from invisibility and absence; the unpredictable absence of violence, the held promise of a potential conflict, and the looming fear of a threat-come-true solidify these walls, in both material and rationale.
And so, it falls to us, the keepers of a shared history, to re-read, re-construct, re-sample, and re-mix as best we can to speak to what is invisible such that that which permeates the air may become solid. The observations shared in this text are sited but aspecific. The privilege of re-reading and re-writing is a daily occurrence globally. It is my hope that re-writing can be done so as not to erase, but to understand.
Bibliography
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Delanda, Manuel. “EXTENSIVE BORDERLINES AND INTENSIVE BORDERLINES.” Architectural Design 69, no. 7/8 (1999): 78–79. https://doi.org/10.1002/(issn)0003-8504.
Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Lumsden, Roddy. Identity parade: New British & Irish Poets. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland England: Bloodaxe Books, 2010.
O’Donnell, Caroline and José Ibarra. Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis. Novato: Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2022.
Ravenscroft, Emily. “The Meaning of the Peacelines of Belfast.” Peace Review 21 no. 2 (2009): 213–21. doi:10.1080/10402650902877450.
[1] Emily Ravenscroft. “The Meaning of the Peacelines of Belfast.” Peace Review 21 (2) (2009): 213–221. doi:10.1080/10402650902877450.
[2] “Timeline.” Peacewall Archive. Accessed May 15, 2025. https://www.peacewall-archive.net/timeline.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123.
[5] John Ó Néill, “The Start of the Peace Lines: Belfast, 1969.,” The Treason Felony Blog, March 18, 2019, https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/the-start-of-the-peace-lines-belfast-1969/.
[6] This finding was a result of conversation with Jennifer Newsom: “The density of lines disrupts the certitude of the hegemonic line”. In conversation with the author, 2023.
[7] The term “intensive” is used here to refer to the inherent possibilities of an object and its future states. See: Manuel Delanda, “EXTENSIVE BORDERLINES AND INTENSIVE BORDERLINES.,” Architectural Design 69, no. 7/8 (1999): 78–79, https://doi.org/10.1002/(issn)0003-8504. Edited by Maggie Toy.
[8] Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines, p. 148.
[9] Colette Bryce, “Line” in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, ed. Roddy Lumsden (Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland England: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 63.
[10] Ibid.
[11] This can be attributed to an application of Derridean logic pertaining to his theory on différance, wherein the object in question is equally defined by all that it is and by all that it is not. This logic is used here regarding spatial relationships, where division marks connectivity. (See: Derrida, Jacques. Differance, University of Chicago Press: 1982)
[12] Caroline O’Donnell and José Ibarra. Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis. Novato: Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2022, 7.