THE area didn’t really have a name when I first knew it in my youth. It was just ‘the town’, more specifically the part of Belfast we liked best. The first big attraction was the old Smithfield market, a sheltered, single storey warren, little shops selling things you didn’t get in the corner shop or the high street.
There was the second hand book shop with its most garish covers on display. There was Joe Kavanagh’s I Buy Anything . There was the joke shop that sold whoopee cushions and fake turds.
This was off the upper part of North Street until the IRA destroyed it in the mid 1970s. They had bombed the lower part of North Street before that, trashing shops fronts on both sides all the way down. That was in the summer of 1972.
More recently, North Street, Donegall Street and the streets around there have been called the Cathedral Quarter, St Anne’s cathedral being the most prominent building there. This was part of a marketing effort, I suspect, to make it sound like a nice respectable district. An open space across from the cathedral, is now Writer’s Square.
Another bit of deft marketing to associate the area with culture and imagination. Parts of the Cathedral Quarter are beautiful now and keep something of the character of the old city. First came the artists for the cheap studio and office spaces.
Then came the bars and restaurants to serve them and after that came the professionals, the law firms and architects. That was a kind of natural development that.