The last 50 years has seen a growing literature contributing to the understanding of the history of Belfast. Much of this has demonstrated the complexity of the conflicts for which the city is known, ranging from the focus on the monopolistic politics of the city to the socio-economic character of Catholic and Protestant areas.Footnote ¹ Other contributions have an almost deliberate insistence that there was, and is, more to Belfast than conflict and violence.Footnote ² At the same time, a small and honourable literature highlights brief moments of co-operation between the major factions, such as during the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907.Footnote ³ This new volume, written by three leading scholars of the history and culture of the city, attempts a coherent narrative of Belfast through the concepts of civic identity and public space. As with many growing cities, Belfast's public space was not just a matter of open streets, squares and markets, or of processions, promenades and meeting places. The question of ‘whose space’ and which public was always a contested one, placing the local state and civic identity at the centre of the ordering and promotion of the city. The three major sections of the book reflect not only the different approaches of the different authors but also the very real changes in the contests for such public space.

During the nineteenth century, the dominance of the Donegal family was replaced by a local representative rate payer state of police commission and municipality. The authors rightly point to Belfast's municipal achievements in terms of markets, layout, drainage and gas works. In terms of public space, the creation of the orderly street with lighting and cleansing was the most important accomplishment. A central role is given to public meetings and processions in carving out public space and claiming identities, of which a civic culture of British patriotism proved the most important. Belfast showed a remarkable ability to return to normal after episodes of conflict, especially when compared to the violence and contested spaces of English and Scottish cities (which, if anything, were more disharmonious before 1850 than in Ireland). By the end of the Edwardian period, Belfast had a variety of prestige buildings, notably the Custom House with the Square for meetings and, above all, the City Hall. Nonetheless, readers of Urban History might ask why so few world cities experienced the apparently endemic conflict of Belfast in the twentieth century. There were thus contradictions at the heart of this civic culture that demonstrated the limits of liberalism to negotiate conflicts of value and identity.

After this thoughtful and balanced account of the nineteenth century, John Nagle's account of the home rule and partition years comes across with considerable brutality. Public space was Protestant space, a space for Orange marches, B Specials to patrol, for special courts and a focus on the City Hall and new Stormont parliament as symbols of dominance and exclusion. This was enforced not only by Special Powers Acts but also by the 1954 Flags and Emblems Act aimed at displays of the Irish Tricolour – an act that David Trimble assured me, in an academic seminar, was one of the most important defences of British liberty.

Dominic Bryan's chapter on public space since the 1960s is an account of its mutability. The streets and the City Hall have central place. The violence of the 1970s onwards restricted any sense of public space. Restrictions were formal ones, such as banned marches or security gates, or implicit in barricades and bombing campaigns and the paramilitary dominance of specific areas. In such a situation, the urbanist needs to ask if there was any such thing as public space, or perhaps there was more than one public after the manner of some accounts of civil society. Bryan points to the incursions of several organizations that challenge the twin ethnic identities. In the 1960s, CND, housing tenant marches to City Hall and the Trades Unions were able to do this at times. During the last 20 years, St Patrick's Day, the Lord Mayor's Show and even attempts to rebrand the Orange Order as carnival have attempted to capture a unified ‘public’, but venues were required to exclude football shirts and flags to gain local state funding. So far, gay pride marches seem to have avoided any sectarian branding. Bryan points to the greater acceptance of diversity in recent years and the increase in those who refuse either Protestant or Catholic identity in recent survey data, but warns of the move from shared space to partitioned space.

This book offers a valuable contribution to the history of Belfast, a welcome addition to the history of industrial and post-industrial towns and an enquiry into the changing nature of civic public space. There is a useful antidote here to the corrosive street wisdom of Belfast that violent sectarian conflict is perpetual and always has been – and, more depressingly, always will be. For these authors, change was persistent and linked not just to religious and national identity but to the nature of the state, and that other mystical element that historians of many cities will recognize: civic identity.