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The first walk of 2011, another city centre walk, took in some of Belfast’s fountains. We started from Writers Square making our way firstly to the buoys outside the Art College (UU Belfast campus). There was a collective memory of the buoys as a water feature but no one was sure when it stopped working as the site was re landscaped recently. The plaque declares that ‘ these buoys are in pre 1979 Lateral Systems Buoyancy Colours’, but they have been repainted other colours more recently.
We then moved onto Castlecourt to check out another half recollected water feature, which transpired not to be there any more. Everyone had a vague memory of a low walled, blue tiled water feature under the entrance escalator. There is now a perfume counter at the former site.
We then moved onto the more promising sounding Fountain St, which was named after a spring diverted from Muny’s well in Sandy Row to provide the poor of the city with water. The existence of the previous spring sparked the DSD to commission a piece of Public Artwork called The Magic Jug, which after a series of debates about the ownership and nature of public space did not go ahead. See http://placeni.blogspot.com/2010/05/debate-goes-on.html and http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110495205642651
However Fountain St still sports one water feature on the 1st floor of the Fountain Centre, a kitsch pool tile lined with bronze toddlers. None of us, by then with the shivering cold, could manage to flick a penny into the pool. Given the bracing weather we moved with a nod to the fountain outside the BBC and the water feature in the oyster cleansed pond at the gasworks, both of which we came across on out attempt to divine the Blackstaff, before heading to Jaffa’s Fountain. The yellow cast iron Victorian structure was bequeathed as a gift top the city by the Jaffa family and was returned, repainted to its original site on Victoria St (the entrance to new Victoria Centre) after a stint of neglect in the Ormeau Park. The structure doesn’t operate as a water feature any more but sadly does appear to have served as a urinal in its new home.
The Victoria Centre, in all its brassy lavishness seemed the type of location where we might find a water feature but like Castlecourt it’s offering was also short lived. A tiled wall leading to the car park had once water cascading down it to a pool below where any gathered pennies would be given to the children’s charity, Bernardos. The feature looked like it had been dry for some time.
Not content to leave the centre without something spectacular we when up the lift to the top floor to take in the panoramic view of the city and see if we could spot any other or far flung fountains that we might have missed, such as the fountain in Custom House Square or the one in Dunville in the west of the city. We descended via the spiral staircase giving ourselves an unexpected dose of vertigo. Mac noted that we had yet to do the highs and lows of Belfast.
