Routed Out – Frank McNally on the defensive road map of West Belfast

When you walk the short distance from Belfast city centre to the lower Falls, as I did earlier this week, you must first cross a No Man’s Land called the Westlink Road. It’s not literally a no-man’s-land. There are thousands of men and women in cars using this north-south traffic artery, with dual or three-lane carriageways in both directions.

But if you’re crossing it by foot or bike from the relatively intimate city centre to the even more intimate Falls or Shankill, it feels like a motorised Grand Canyon.

Also known as the A12, the Westlink is all that remains now of a 1960s masterplan in which the city centre would have been encircled with a similarly multi-laned highway.

Even aside from its unfortunate acronym, the Belfast Urban Motorway (BUM) was the misguided dream of a car-obsessed era. And eventually, a shortage of money and the Troubles conspired to kill it off, except for one section, downgraded from the original.

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But the Troubles also explain the bit that was built. For by the 1970s, the demands of mere urban planning and traffic management had combined with British military objectives, making it doubly desirable that troublesome West Belfast be cut off from the city centre.

It wasn’t just the Republican Falls they had in mind: neighbouring Shankill would be isolated too. Then and later, loyalists there have been known for demanding the right to march the Queen’s highway. In the meantime, the Queen’s highway demanded the right to march through them.

In the cause of road widening and progress in general, the BUM deal meant that swaths of densely built housing had to disappear from both lower Falls and Shankill. The buffer zone would also leave much vacant space on either side of the asphalt.

But the plan, in the words of one Belfast architect (Mark Hackett, quoted by my colleague Frank McDonald some years ago) was that the city centre could then be “regenerated in a nice way, with the middle classes free to roam via the bubble of their cars whilst the poorer neighbourhoods were ‘confined to barracks’.”

Having created this motorised barrier – a carricade, as it were – between the city and wild west, the A12 would long struggle in its primary role.

Much criticised over the years for the traffic jams at intersections, it has been the subject of number of upgrades, not always successful. An underpass opened in 2008 flooded to a depth of six metres soon afterwards, resulting in the road’s temporary renaming as the “Wetlink”.

In the meantime, Belfast was also developing in ways the traffic planners of 1964 could hardly have foreseen. A steady stream of black taxis now makes the east-west journey over the A12 every day: ferrying tourists to the Falls and Shankill murals and requiring the provision of lay-bys in places.

Tours include an even more blatant form of “defensive architecture” (as Prof Dominic Bryan of Queen’s University calls it) than the Westlink: the peace-walls.

I was writing yesterday, by the way, about Fanum House: the unlovely Belfast office block formerly home to The Irish Times, RTÉ, and Sky among other companies, and now on death row pending redevelopment (I’ll press the button on the demolition if they need a volunteer).

As mentioned then, fanum is the Latin word for a “sacred place”, or shrine. Hence an inscription on a preserved pottery jug from Roman-era London referring to “Fanum Isidis”, the “Temple of Isis”.

But it turns out that Fanum House is not unrelated to the phenomenon that gave rise to the Belfast Urban Motorway scheme. Because the original house of the name, in London, was headquarters to the Automobile Association, which had “fanum” as its call sign.

All other British offices of the AA were so named too in time, including the brutalist office block in Belfast, later to change ownership and tenants.

In those car-worshipping days of the 1960s, the BUM proponents had a range of plans tailored to how much public money might be available. The pessimistic estimate was £4 million a year. The working assumption was £7 million. Their fantasy figure was £10 million: in the event of which bonanza, they had a vision in which no fewer than 11 motorways would criss-cross Belfast.

Perhaps luckily, in this case at least, the pessimists were right. Only phase one of the scheme came to pass in any form. As for the rest of BUM, one commentator recently concluded, the climate of public and government opinion has moved so far since 1964 it seems “very unlikely indeed that any other parts of the proposal will ever be built”.