Mismanaged Decline

Walk towards the centre of Belfast from the south of the city, along the Dublin Road, and you’ll pass what used to be the Movie House cinema. It sold cheap tickets, screened mostly blockbusters, had wall-to wall-sticky carpets and, though it was built as recently as the mid-1990s, felt considerably older. It was the kind of place that’s precious precisely because it’s a bit of a dump.

In 2017, planning permission was granted for a £65 million ‘upgrade’ on the site. One Bankmore Square would have space for three thousand office workers in its twelve storeys, an outdoor cinema and a roof garden. ‘We believe that Belfast needs a world-class grade A office development,’ the developer told the Belfast Telegraph. ‘One Bankmore Square will inject tens of millions of pounds into the local economy, create thousands of jobs … and add incredible value to people that live and work in Belfast.’

In February 2019, a software company, Kainos, bought the site for its new headquarters, though with a scaled-back version of One Bankmore Square in mind. Through the first year of the pandemic, as the shift to remote working made new office space seem increasingly redundant, the decommissioned cinema sat wrapped up like one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s buildings, waiting to be demolished. When it eventually came down in May 2021, the sight was spectacular. It was ripped apart from the inside out, three walls still standing while the immense concrete-framed theatres, chairs and all, were scooped out of it. You hated to see it go, but what an exit.

More than two years later, the project’s future is vague. Kainos sold half the site to Queen’s University in October 2022, and for now it is an ‘ethical pop-up street food market’. First called ‘Box Office’, it has since been renamed ‘Trade Market’; shipping containers nestle together under a large awning, which seems to have been put up to give a sense of the enveloping permanence of a real building and, as my mother would say, to take the bad look off it all.

Carry on along Bedford Street for about five minutes and you reach the imposing sandstone Scottish Mutual Building, erected in 1904. Bought by a group with plans for a boutique hotel in 2013, it changed hands again in 2017 and for a time was set to become the George Best Hotel. By 2020, Signature Living, the group behind the project, had gone into administration. Until last November, the signs in the boarded up ground-floor windows said: ‘Maradona good, Pelé better, George Best … Opening Summer 2018’. The windows are still boarded up, but the signs now say: ‘Welcome to the Linen Quarter’. The site was bought last December by another property developer with plans for yet another boutique hotel – there are already at least nine hotels within a five-minute walk – but it is unclear when construction might begin.

The city centre of Belfast is littered with the carcasses of stalled or failed development projects, while long-empty buildings, some historic and disarmingly beautiful, some precious dumps, fall into dereliction. One of the most prominent of the proposed schemes is Tribeca, with an office on North Street, a ten-minute walk towards the other side of town. Formerly ‘Royal Exchange’ and before that ‘North East Quarter’, Tribeca has been the evolving vision of different developers since around 2003; since 2016 it has been in the hands of Castlebrooke Investments. The area it speculatively covers is vast – as much as twelve acres – including large parts of the Cathedral Quarter.

Early on, the scheme came in for some controversy over North Street Arcade, a 1930s Art Deco building earmarked for development. The arcade had been damaged by the premature detonation of an IRA bomb in the 1970s, which killed four people, but by the early millennium it was home to a host of small enterprises attracted by the low rents, untypical architecture and a feeling of community. In April 2004 it was devastated by an arson attack: no one was ever prosecuted, and the arcade has lain derelict ever since.

Last October, another fire tore through the Old Cathedral Buildings, round the corner on Donegall Street, the site, once again, of an array of local businesses including a violin workshop, a popular café, a wedding-dress shop and artists’ studios. ‘Belfast fire echoes 2004 North Street Arcade blaze,’ the Irish News reported. This time, an 18-year-old was charged based on CCTV evidence; the damage is said to have run to £3 million.

As for Tribeca, a timeline of progress on the Castlebrooke Investments website stops in 2020. Part of the problem is said to be a squabble over the Department for Social Development’s refusal to relinquish public ownership of Writers’ Square. Development and regeneration are dirty words in many cities, for good reason, but in Belfast they feel synonymous with a unique brand of mismanaged decline: the glittering promise of a future that always, eventually, just kind of trails off.