Belfast

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Photo by Robert Lemermeyer

“Don’t let any pricks tell you we have forgotten the Troubles; we haven’t, but we are all of a mind to move on,” says one. I’m reflecting on this solemn cultural nugget when I realize that he literally wants to move on – to the hot spot across the street. The irreverent Cloth Ear (whose moniker is derived from the Irish saying, “Are ye deaf?”) is also emblematic of the new Belfast: relaxed and fun with a mix of hen parties, first timers and Paul Smith-clad dandies. It’s a disparate group, but it doesn’t take long before commonality emerges like a weed through concrete (football, mainly). My husband and I hang out, chat and enjoy the teenage basement-rec-room-meets-cabin-couture vibe of plaid curtains, wood panelling, postmodern fir stag-head trophies and copper pendant lamps.

I haul my last legs across the cobblestone street to the Potthouse, which has come up with a whole new way to unite Belfast: Forget youth groups and public service announcements – they’re drawn here by a common desire to gawk at mini skirt-clad lasses dancing on the second-storey clear glass dance floor. Brilliant! I trust they got a grant from the local peace-building organization to construct this engineering marvel, and maybe one from the local chiropractors too (think craned necks). Thankfully most of the necks in town are supple, as 56 percent of Belfast’s population is under 30. (After a night on the town, it’s apparent to me that I am... not.)

“Unlike Londoners, you can’t tell Belfastians what’s cool. What’s cool here is determined by people’s footsteps,” says Kevin Smyth, general manager of Ten Square, the Victorian linen warehouse turned hotel where we’re staying. I follow his advice and find Belfast eminently walkable, a superfluous attribute back when there was a soldier on every street corner, but handy now that the U.N. ranks Belfast the second safest city in the world. Maybe those sentinels can be retrained as traffic cops and crossing guards: Large swaths of downtown are newly pedestrian-only, to stem the hemorrhaging traffic of shiny new cars from the countryside and encourage people to populate streets that used to be shuttered at 5 p.m. sharp.

The city’s energy spills beyond the downtown, as I discover exploring several new quarters. At the Laganside waterfront, one wide-eyed lad points to the newly built Odyssey entertainment complex, home of the Belfast Giants hockey team, as a sign of the city’s ascendancy. “Your Theoren Fleury plays for us.” I get his point – what Canadian market has a professional hurling team? On fashionable Lisburn Road, a half-hour stroll from city centre, I’m getting the hard sell on a pair of Victoria Beckham’s VB jeans. (Though at £365, I expect Posh to have worn them herself.) The Cathedral Quarter types refer to this as the “yuppie area,” but even then they use the term in equal parts revulsion and pride now that, finally, they have yuppies to disdain.

As I survey the city’s long-abandoned docklands just outside downtown, I’m reminded that great comebacks don’t come without risk. The planned Titanic Quarter has a few obstacles ahead, like a century’s worth of industrial disrepair dotting the oddly lunar landscape of the world’s largest dry dock. Lucite-covered scale models show me that by 2021 it will morph into a 185-acre urban oasis of condos, shops and trees. Oh, and there’s the tricky matter of the development’s name and theme, focused on recreating the mythology of the shipyard’s most famous progeny. Which was the greatest ship in the world before some other blokes sunk it, they’re quick to tell you here. The shirts hawked to Leo-and-Kate-loving groupies say it all: “She was fine when she left here.” Titanic Quarter project chief executive Mike Smith references that mixed bag of mythology when he says, “If Belfast wants to move forward, we have to embrace our past.”

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