Just back from a great evening at the Linen Hall Library.  Squashed into a tiny upstairs room, a capacity crowd sweltered happily for an hour to get the chance to listen to Alf McCreary (off of the Belfast Telegraph) tell the story of Titanic Port, his weighty tome covering the history of Belfast Harbour.

I felt quite proud to realise how my wee parish has such a dense and varied history.  At one stage Belfast was the third largest city in the Empire, and the ships and technological innovations that poured forth from the Queen’s Island (or Dargan’s Island as it was) were without parallel – we built the biggest and best ships in the world.  As Alf said, Belfast once stood prominent in world affairs in the same way that Silicon Valley stands tall in the microchip age.  The streets we walk today in the Titanic Quarter have seen prosperity, depression, World War, leisure (did you know that Queen’s Island was once a pleasure park?), intense hard work, triumph, tragedy, and hundreds of thousands of individual human stories.  What a heritage.

It’s all built, Alf reminded us, on “stuff”.  Queen’s Island is reclaimed land, created by an ambitious development scheme,  formed from the mud dredged from the bottom of the Lagan in order to enlarge the entrance to the harbour (the mud referred to as “stuff” by the men doing the dredging).  So it’s appropriate that it’s been a place for experimentation and entrepreneurial adventures over the years – which makes it all the more exciting that the Titanic Quarter and (hopefully) The Dock are continuing in that grand tradition.

I’m having a fantastic time sharing the story of the TQ these days.  I’ve been from Mossley (my home town) to Larne (where I had my first Curacy post) to East Belfast (where memories of the old docklands are still living stories) to Tullylish (near Banbridge – check your map) and lots of places in between – everywhere people are excited, hopeful, optimistic, encouraged that this new thing is happening.  There is a real feeling that it is all good news for Belfast and for Northern Ireland – something to be proud of.  Alf’s lecture was a timely reminder that there is plenty to be proud of in our history too.