ABSTRACT

As is often the case, it was at the city’s low point that the seeds of its recovery were planted. It was in 1981 that Paddy Doherty started the Derry Inner City Trust with the intention of buying buildings that had been damaged by bombing or had fallen into dereliction. Using unemployed young people, these buildings were refurbished and put to community use, creating new shops and business space and low-cost housing. It is because of the trust that there remains a tradition of living over the shop in the city centre. The work of the Inner City Trust continues but, does not have the profile that it did in the 1980s. Then it was held up as the best and certainly the bravest example of community-led regeneration in the UK, inspiring many other building preservation trusts to emulate the model. Adversity tends to work like this; it breeds resilience and creates opportunities for people to try something new. In Derry~Londonderry it cemented a society of tight-knit extended families and communities known for their ready warmth and quick wit. It forged politicians like the Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume and the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness. It created authors like Seamus Deane, Jennifer Johnston and, of course, Seamus Heaney. It also nurtured a lively counterculture and music scene personified by the band the Undertones. This cultural resilience not only helped the people of Derry~Londonderry to survive the Troubles, it also laid the foundation for the city’s recovery once peace had been secured. The symbol of this culture-led recovery was Derry~Londonderry’s designation as UK’s first City of Culture for 2013. The year saw the city host a huge range of cultural events in theatre, music and film, symbolically marking the city’s rebirth. As Ed Vulliamy wrote in the Observer newspaper; ‘beneath the surface of cultural prestige, the resounding achievement of Derry’s year as City of Culture lies in the way it not only refused to airbrush the Troubles and Bloody Sunday with arty-farty gloss, but engaged in a reckoning with the recent past’. This

renaissance of the city has also included the opening of a pedestrian crossing, the Peace Bridge, over the River Foyle and new cultural institutions like the Millennium Forum and included the recovery of the city’s economy based in part on the digital economy and a high-capacity transatlantic IT link that has encouraged US companies like Seagate to base themselves there. The city’s regeneration strategy is set out in Derry City Council’s One City, One Plan, One Vote regeneration initiative, which includes a vision of ‘a competitive, connected, creative and caring city’. The council has been particularly innovative in its involvement of young people, creating a new post of Children and Young People’s Co-ordinator to help embed the rights of children and young people in strategic planning, policy and decision-making arrangements at a local level. The strategy has seen the ongoing restoration of the city centre and the extension of development across the Peace Bridge to the Ebrington Barracks. This was an American naval base during the war but more recently was the home of the British Army and was therefore off-limits for most of the population. The new bridge has opened this up as an emergent new quarter for the city with housing, workspace and leisure facilities. One of the ongoing frustrations lies in the higher education sector. The city’s promotional literature highlights the University of Ulster’s Magee Campus in the city. However, in reality the long campaign to establish a University of Derry has not been successful, not yet at least. Instead, when the University of Ulster was established in 1968 it’s main campus was built in Coleraine with only a satellite campus of some 3,500 students in Derry~Londonderry. This was one of the grievances that sparked the civil rights movement. While Derry~Londonderry has discovered a new prosperous future, this lack of a major university and student body remains a legacy of the city’s history that risks holding back its further development.