Memoryscaping: remembering conflict and constructing mnemonic places on guided walks through Belfast

In September 1999, Tom brought his girlfriend to Belfast for the first time. He walked her from the train station, through the Catholic Short Strand, up past City Hall, through the Cathedral Quarter, into a paramilitary bar (accidentally), and circled back into town before finally arriving at the Europa – Europe’s most bombed hotel. In September 2024, Tom took me on that same walk, reflecting on fear, memory, and how spaces can both change dramatically and stay exactly the same. Tom was one of over twenty people who walked me through Belfast during September and October 2024. Each walk had one main purpose – to return to places of significant memory and reflect on those memories in situ. Through mapping these walks, I began to form a spatial puzzle of memory and place in post-Troubles Belfast. This dissertation explores five themes from my experiences walking through Belfast with its people: the liminality of mnemonic spaces, affective distancing and disembodiment in remembering, intimacy and place in memories of violence, symbolic and somatic layers of memory, and the durability of the ordinary in a post-conflict urban archive. Ultimately this dissertation concludes that the relationship between the body, memory, and place is dynamic and transcendent. This relationship supersedes time and the built environment itself to reveal multiple felt places that keep Belfast rooted in its past, for better and worse. At the same time, this project mapped the geography of a city changing, as Belfast collectively decides the extent to which it will be defined by its Troubles.