Barrow Square
OGU have been working with Belfast Harbour…….
The Barrow Square project aims to reinvigorate a public space in a community which has been very badly affected by post-war road planning.
The Barrow Square project explores how the underused square might be reinvigorated in advance of the site being fully developed. New activity and covered space is brought to the area at these points of cultural intersection between the former harbour, office buildings and local community who still retain a strong identity connected to the docks. It is intended that a small investment in this meanwhile project will support the existing regeneration efforts of the local community and enliven the square in this interim period prior to long term development.
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Belfast Harbour
MMAS
Design ID
WH Stephens
SCC
Historically, the identity of Belfast’s Sailortown was born out of a unique spatial condition; the urban neighbourhood fabric of Sailortown projecting into and overlapping with the working river edge (see site plan). This created a meaningful threshold between work and play, domesticity and industry, focus and escape, day and night. The now derelict Rotterdam and Pat’s Bar (facing onto Barrow Square) were located directly at the boundary, creating a deep threshold between work and community: creativity and culture thrived in these spaces. The relationship between industry and community and the wider influx and influence as a maritime neighbourhood supported a huge range of creative communities, from live music to boxing, festival organisations, ice cream carts and marble crafts.
Image Above: The last piece of Sailortown reaching into the Harbour.
Over the last half century encircling urban highways have squeezed out much of the surrounding Sailortown community. Changing from busy harbourside to riverside office park has largely removed evening and weekend life, while the square feels somewhat desolate during working hours. The Sailortown community is recovering and the area has become a thoroughfare for recreational and commuter travel, with the emerging cultural focal point of St Josephs Church and the American Bar bringing a renewed sense of the place as a cultural node.
The now vacant and derelict site of Pat’s Bar and the Rotterdam Bar once expressed the life, music and culture of the Sailortown community, but now the derelict buildings blight the most prominant frontage of the square. They now serve as a monument to the cultural loss of recent urban development.
Image Above: Site of Barrow Square highlighted in red
Image Above: Belfast Trusses speaking to each other across Time
The now vacant and derelict site of Pat’s Bar and the Rotterdam Bar once expressed the life, music and culture of the Sailortown community, but now the derelict buildings blight the most prominant frontage of the square. They now serve as a monument to the cultural loss of recent urban development.
Over the last half century encircling urban highways have squeezed out much of the surrounding Sailortown community. Changing from busy harbourside to riverside office park has largely removed evening and weekend life, while the square feels somewhat desolate during working hours. The Sailortown community is recovering and the area has become a thoroughfare for recreational and commuter travel, with the emerging cultural focal point of St Josephs Church and the American Bar bringing a renewed sense of the place as a cultural node.
Image Above: Belfast Trusses speaking to each other across Time
Approach
Overall Small Project Winner 2022 – Judge David Morley
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It was important that the work would have a civic scale. The proposal is for the insertion of colonnaded pavilions forming edges to the square which currently feel ‘gappy’ and incomplete, planned for vehicle movement rather than pedestrians. Inspired by the historic dock shed structures that used to occupy the space, the pavilions will have a mix of workspace, food and community space to engage and attract people, with sheltered decks providing informal spaces for a wide range of users including local resident groups to fill and inhabit. A new series of events are planned to support the use of the square.
This work intends to create a safer, greener, more attractive and more people-friendly environment in the docks area. It aims to promote the key active travel route through the space whilst increasing footfall along the river’s edge: Belfast notoriously rejects and turns its back on the river and has failed to take advantage of the water as a pubic space.
The scheme is proposed as a demountable installation that can be resused elsewhere. It brings together many of the approaches to ‘temporary’ architecture that our team have been developing across many of our urban projects. It is hoped that the scheme will obtain planning permission in the next month and that the work will act as a significant catalyst to the once powerful civic and cultural life of the riverside
