Few cities have been transformed as dramatically as Belfast. Guardian readers recently voted it their favourite UK city,which would delight locals like author Glenn PattersonThe playwright Owen McCafferty once said of growing up in Belfast in the 1970s: “We lived in a very black and white world then … and we should have been living in colour.” He was pleased with that line – who wouldn’t be. I was pleased just to be standing facing him when he said it. And he was absolutely true, even whether I have photographic evidence that there was colour around then – most of it on me, or none of it matching. Belfast of old was a byword for binary oppositions: never mind the “peace” walls,we partitioned the city in our own heads – that street estimable, that street no-move.
Which is one of the reasons now I take such delight in walking along a street like Union Street, and behind the city’s Central Library,even on a dark night, even on my own. Union Street in nights gone by was tall up on my no-move list.
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Source: theguardian.com