Planners Get Their Way — and Newry? The Persistence of Colonial Attitudes in the North of Ireland

Abstract

August 1964. Geoffrey Copcutt, an English architect appointed only 18 months earlier by the Northern Ireland (NI) government to design the region’s first ‘New City’ of Craigavon, announces his resignation in an explosive public statement, alleging that he has been “asked to engineer propaganda rather than a city” and criticising the “religious and political considerations” constraining the project.

This episode is only one in a string of controversies revealing the sectarian nature of the “new technocratic strategy of economic modernisation and regional planning” that transformed the built environment of NI from the early 1960s onwards. These included the 1964 Lockwood Committee and 1965 Wilson Plan, both of which concentrated investment and economic development in unionist (mainly Protestant, identifying as British) strongholds, at the expense of nationalist (mainly Catholic, identifying as Irish) areas, as a way to maintain unionist hegemony. While this represented a continuation of practices of dispossession and disenfranchisement that had been ongoing since the 16th and 17th century British plantations of Ireland, the same processes of modernisation also heralded the foundation of the welfare state, leading to the emergence of an increasingly well-educated minority and an associated movement for equality and civil rights. By the late 1960s, the brutal suppression of this movement would erupt into a decades-long cycle of violence known as the Troubles.

With the advent of power sharing since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the fragile, incomplete peace process that it ushered in, such blatant sectarianism and inequality in planning has become a thing of the past. Curiously, however, the same colonial structures and decision-making processes remain a feature of NI planning at local, regional and (inter)national scales. This is evident in the continued colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland (recently highlighted by the imposition of Brexit against the will of NI electorate), but is also to be found in many of the decisions and actions taken by public representatives across the political spectrum.

This paper traces how processes of modernisation have influenced, intersected with, and been informed by the major social and political upheavals during the last 75 years in the North of Ireland. Through revisiting and diffractively re-reading official archival material through other sources, including local and national newspaper accounts, private photographs, video reels and independently-published pamphlets from activists and community groups, it explores how colonial attitudes became embedded in urban planning. Finally, in assessing two controversial infrastructure projects currently being built just 6.4km apart across the same river estuary on the Irish border, namely the Narrow Water Bridge and the Newry Southern Relief Road, the paper examines the extent to which (neo)colonial approaches have become so ingrained that they continue to shape post-conflict urban development on both sides of the political divide.