Blue rejuvenation and reconciliation; Belfast’s titanic watery renaissance

Abstract

Over twenty five years since the Good Friday Agreement, Belfast has moved away from its past Troubles, having reformed itself as a cultural engine and facilitator on the island of Ireland. Beal Feirste, Belfast’s original Irish language name, describes ‘the settlement at the mouth of the River Farset’. The rivers Farset and Lagan conjoin in Belfast and were straightened to form one of Europe’s most accessible deep-water ports. The city is now synonymous with that symbol of venture capital, and venture and capital, the RMS Titanic. Belfast uses its fluvial arteries as connecting points and conduits for material and immaterial flows of energy, ideas and currency across the city and further across the historic province of Ulster. Its iconic status as a shipbuilding city has enabled it to draw in international tourists who flow onwards to fly fish at Lake Neagh, step up the coast to the Giant’s Causeway and drift inland towards Seamus Heaney country, to link industry and ideas together as leisure domains. The fabrication of modern Belfast continues with the emergence of the Titanic Quarter, framed around the River Lagan’s waters, offering both a museum dedicated to the ship’s legacy, real, fiction and filmic. Alongside art installations and working film studios which mythologise Northern Ireland’s beautiful landscapes in fantasy works such as Game of Thrones and Dungeons and Dragons and its fantastic people in Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Belfast’, the Titanic Quarter joins the ‘Lagan Corridor’ to flood the former shipbuilding area with visitors, artists and artisans, keeping stories, history and the economy alive. This chapter explores Belfast’s watery renaissance as a space of reconciling political and cultural history, along with a reincarnation of Irish sensibilities as imaginative and playful, to argue that both real and imaginary waterscapes link Belfast’s blue rejuvenation as a tourist destination