‘This is still a segregated area, and will remain so,” says a tour guide, addressing a group gazing at sectarian murals and memorials off Belfast’s Shankill Road. The union flags waving next to front doors, the republican gift shop, the many kilometres of steel and wire that are the city’s peace walls: the past is still vivid here in west Belfast, but change is visible too.
A few hundred metres from the site of the Shankill Road bombing, carried out by the IRA almost exactly 30 years ago, are the imposing black iron gates of the Shankill Road Mission. Founded in 1898 to help the local poor, the building had been empty for over a decade – with peeling walls, crumbling plaster and archaic fixtures – but now its corridors are full of timber, paint and tools as it’s transformed into studios by the artist collective Vault.
