Location: MD008 and online at:  https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/36371312362171?p=YzhAVpWkOiB5DX4vbx

Meeting ID: 363 713 123 621 71

Passcode: WZ6JA3HU

ABSTRACT:

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Northern Ireland’s cities faced a housing crisis driven not only by wartime damage, but as a result of decades of neglect and government inaction in public house building. Major UK policy shifts forced the NI government to engage in a comprehensive public housebuilding programme from the late 1940s onwards. New build estates were constructed on greenfield sites, dealing rapidly with the sharper edges of housing shortage. Housing in inner-city areas had also deteriorated massively, requiring state intervention to tackle problems of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. In the early 1960s the NI government tasked local authorities and the Northern Ireland Housing Trust with the large-scale clearance and redevelopment of the inner-city housing identified as being beyond repair. Victorian terraced streets were replaced with a modernist mixture of high-rise and low-rise apartment complexes and lower density traditional housing. The permeable gridiron of terraced streets was replaced with a mixture of culs-de-sac and courtyard developments that separated pedestrians and vehicles, but also created more closed-off and insular micro-communities. The construction of new roads and urban motorways added to the comprehensive nature of the changes to the urban fabric.

This seminar paper outlines the history of this process and its immediate and long-term impacts on urban communities in NI. Histories of this period have an understandable focus on the beginning of the ‘Troubles’ and the issues that acted as a catalyst for the activism and later violence of the conflict. Fair housing allocation was of course central to the demands of the civil rights movement, and has been researched in some detail. However, housing has the potential to be used as a prism through which to view the multi-layered issues affecting NI society in this period and after. This frame allows us to identify the common experiences of urban communities globally in the post-war period, but also the particularities of the NI experience. The paper finishes with an outline of the ‘Home in Troubled Times’ project, which will utilise this history to engage younger people and migrant communities with the historical debates and legacy contemporary urban issues that continue to impact neighbourhoods today.

Dr Adrian Grant is a Lecturer in History at Ulster University and a member of INCORE. He has written widely on the conflicted history of twentieth century Ireland, and more recently with a focus on urban change in time of conflict. He was PI on the AHRC funded ‘Divided Pasts – Design Futures’ project that explored the history of urban redevelopment in Derry. He was also CAIN Transformation Project Lead, securing design upgrades and new funding for the CAIN website.