Belfast: From the dark end of the street

Belfast's Falls Rd murals are attractions for tourists, everyday life for locals. Photo / Ewan McDonald

Ewan McDonald puts on his greatcoat and goes walking in the footsteps of a Belfast cowboy.

The tourist board has left a brochure in the hotel room, listing the city's top attractions, among which is this very pub, the Europa, "the most bombed hotel in Europe in the 70s and 80s". Some claim to fame: those were busy seasons in the Champions League of terrorism.

No1 is City Hall, which brings the thought that if the local government offices are the best thing about town, it's time to ring Hertz and make arrangements to see the country. Then the museums, parliament buildings, concert arenas and the mall. The mall is a tourist attraction?

There is an hour before sunset and walking is always the best way to get to know a city. Even on a bitter, cold, glowering, grumpy, trenchcoat, hat-and-scarf Sunday afternoon.

Across the river into the suburbs. Forty minutes later, off broad, empty, Castlereagh Rd and into the pubs and dairies of Beersbridge Rd. At the petrol station on the corner, turn into the narrow, red-brick street, red-brick two-up two-downs built almost to the pavement, broken gates and a rusting Astra. Boys pick up their footballs and stare.

The house I seek is undistinguished, and indistinguishable, from its neighbours. At No125 the half-closed venetians don't rustle. The occupants are used to strangers staring. There are three other people here: most have earphones, channelling music that came deep from the heart of a lonely kid in the upstairs bedroom.

Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven, on long summer nights
As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg
And the voices whispered across Beechie River,
In the days before rock and roll.

The so-tiny-it's-almost-embarrassed brass plaque by the black front door acknowledges this is where the sound and soul and soul and sound of rock grew up. On Hyndford St. East Belfast. The home of George Ivan Morrison. Van the boy.

Van Morrison grew up in East Belfast. Photo / Supplied

Every street, place became a song: Abetta Parade. St Donard's Church. North Rd. Orangefield School. To steal another, it is Sunday six-bells when I leave North Rd and turn into a far more elegant boulevard of Georgian houses, three storeys, driveways large enough to accommodate six white horses and a carriage. The trees lining these broad pavements are winter-bare; there are no leaves left to fall one by one by one.

My heart keeps beating faster, and I can't stand still. I'm caught, up on Cyprus Avenue.

A dozen visiting journalists are ticking off many of the attractions on the official list.

The Westminster administration might have decided that democracy was a very bad form of government and not to be practised here, but Stormont's parliament buildings have the most beautiful setting and dignified architecture. Just down the road, the grammar school's doorknocker opened a former pupil's way into Narnia.

And then ... the driver turns the coach into a busy street of small shops and houses, not unlike Dominion Rd.

Warehouse walls are graphically, determinedly, explicitly, crafted into murals. The subjects come from the neighbourhood, the island, the other island across the water, Cuba or Africa or America, but there is one theme: struggles of the underclass, the oppressed, they might have been labelled at one time; insurgents now.

This is the Solidarity Wall, one of the modern world's more curious tourist attractions. Busloads and black-taxi tours bring people from around the world here, to a street whose name was once a byword for terror. Murder. Hatred. On both sides of the divide that begins here, the Falls Rd in West Belfast.

For three decades the six counties in the North of Ireland were ripped apart, more than 3500 men, women and children died, thousands more were maimed physically and emotionally in a civil war derisively described as "The Troubles".

Officially, peace broke out with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. But this is still a divided city; not, and likely never, a community. Barbed-wire fences - again, deceptively, known as "peace lines" - separate many neighbourhoods.

We're taken to the oldest, and highest, the 14m-high Wall No1 between the republican Falls and unionist Shankill roads at Cupar St. Put up after the 1969 riots, it has been standing longer than the Berlin Wall. Its heavy iron gates are still closed when passions seethe; marches of those supporting partisan creeds or football teams. Every few metres along the streets are photos and memorials, flowers and slogans to the lost.

The Solidarity Wall, its murals frequently repainted with homages to new battles and jailings, links causes from the news bulletins to the republican cause. An artist holds an enlargement of an old newspaper photo, inspiring a younger man to new art that will show riot-helmeted police manhandling a cowering youth. On house and shop walls across West Belfast, both parties continue the propaganda war.

All the chains, badges, flags and emblems, And every strain on brain and every eye.

Belfast was a glowering constant in the 20th-century headlines, such a huge presence that it is a surprise to realise that it is a tiny city. It doesn't have the empirical grandeur of Rome, prettiness of Paris, flamboyance of Barcelona. It has grit. It has a past. Its presence, in its streets and mesmeric pubs and come-all-ye musical culture, is the resilient people.

At Belfast's Solidarity Wall, the senior artist drafts the next mural. Photo / Ewan McDonald

On the old docks, where the River Lagan enters Belfast Lough, they have launched the Titanic Quarter where the doomed ship and its two luckier sisters were built. Typical of Belfast's luck that everyone remembers the third one. The chest side of a popular T-shirt proclaims, "We are the only people in the world who could build an unsinkable ship." The back reads, "And it sank."

Harland and Wolff shipyard also created much of the greatest merchant fleet and Navy the world has known. The list of tourist attractions features the two massive yellow cranes known as Samson and Goliath: obsolete, they stand as memorials to Belfast's pride in its industrial past, the shipbuilding and linen histories.

Two recent developments are the Titanic Heritage Centre and Fox's Titanic movie studios. As romance grew around the great liner in the wake (sorry) of James Cameron's 1997 movie, the city realised it could honour its leading role in the saga.

Faced with the slightly ticklish question of cashing in on an era-defining tragedy, Belfast opted instead to "honour the contribution of the workers who created the legendary ship". Tad unfortunate that the white, jagged-shard architecture of the sound-and-light centre has been nicknamed "the Iceberg" from its rather too obvious resemblance. But it is worth a half-day's visit.

For pop-culture followers, so too is the guided tour of the nearby studios, Ground Zero for Game Of Thrones, as are many historic sites around the North of Ireland. Notably ...

"Here we are at the Belfast City Hall," says our guide, and we dutifully leave the coach and enter the - it has to be admitted - gorgeous wedding cake, Portland Stone pile of No1 on the tourist board's must-see list.

The council's official guide is about to retire after 38 years and threatening to write a tell-all about her encounters with Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and the Belfast Cowboy (every local has a story about the time they saw Morrison in a cafe, bar, shop; he owns properties and visits home frequently).

She walks us past the portraits of Lords Mayor, the robing room with its ermine, silver maces and velvet gowns, points out the stained glass windows, and the chambers where - yes, they film the throne-room scenes.

She stops before a glass display case in a corner next to the council chamber, and shows us the ages-old, leather-bound, parchment-inscribed roll of those made a Freeman of the City of Belfast.

"It's a tradition that it's always kept open at the page of the last person so honoured," she purrs.

Number 79. George Ivan "Van" Morrison, in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the city.

"He has portrayed a majestic image of Belfast and continues to inspire generations with his music."

The man has signed underneath the calligraphy. Unfortunately, his biro seems to have run out of ink halfway through.

Ewan McDonald visited Belfast with the Northern Ireland Tourism Board and Emirates Airlines.