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June 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of the publication by Northern Ireland publisher Colourpoint of my book Belfast: Toward a City Without Walls, an exploration of the 100 “peacewalls” and interfaces which divide Protestant from Catholic communities in Belfast and which are a continuing legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The book included a set of black & white images of the peacewalls by internationally renowned Belfast photographer Frankie Quinn .

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I have recently accepted a commission to contribute a chapter to an ambitious book on Belfast, with the broad themes of urbanism and post-conflict, for prospective publication by Actar.  The book has been in preparation for some years by editors Ciaran Mackel, a well-known Belfast architect, and academic architect Alona Martinez.

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Why do the peacewalls matter?  The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was internationally recognised as a textbook conflict resolution process, which brought 30 years of endemic sectarian violence almost entirely to an end.  But the GFA was not perfect. Over 25 years later, the peacewalls remain and have even been extended.  They are a major tourist attraction, both monumental and politically invisible, in some places just a banal mark of systemic neglect.  They are both sign and cause of ongoing trauma in Northern Ireland, and a symbol of the incomplete post-conflict process.  Frankie Quinn’s evolving approach to photographing the walls has helped to maintain interest in the walls, and the process I am engaging in also aims to keep the conversation about the peacewalls and interfaces alive.

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My work for this project will revisit the work of Belfast:  Toward a City Without Walls and I plan to:

• Reconnect with as many as possible of the book's interviewees and contact new stakeholders in the peacewalls and interfaces.

• Host a day conference in Belfast on 23 June 2025, at the Memorial Hall of the former Presbyterian Church on Townsend Street – now the home of the Ulster Orchestra.

• Commission a new set of 20 images from Frankie Quinn, for an exhibition at the conference and to illustrate the book chapter.

• Host a Zoom conversation in September 2025 to discuss the findings of the research.

The conference and article will explore “what has changed, what has been the constructive change, what is changing now, what still needs to change and how might that happen? - around the peacewalls and interfaces in Belfast in 2025?”

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Belfast:  Toward a City Without Walls was written in response to a promise made in 2013 by the Northern Ireland executive at the time (Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness) that all the walls would be removed within 10 years, by 2023.  That --- naïve or cynical -- promise was not fulfilled and Northern Ireland remains a post-conflict society with many unresolved issues.  The book aimed to make a constructive contribution to the ongoing peace process.  To research the book, I interviewed over 100 people and employed my background as a journalist, academic study in complexity and organisational systems thinking and experience as an organisational change consultant to write the book, which explored the “conundrum” of the 100 walls, gates, barriers and interfaces between neighbourhoods in working class Belfast.

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For details of my writing about Northern Ireland since 1978, see this page.

To register for the 23 June conference see here. 

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​A new image (c) Frankie Quinn 2025:  Ulster Orchestra in their new rehearsal space 

in the listed former Presbyterian Church on the Townsend Street interface.

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