by Christopher Moore
And so, it’s finally happening.
The long-threatened closure of the Dublin Road Moviehouse, the only mainstream cinema in South Belfast and the university quarter, is finally coming to an end this April, to make way for that most inspiring of replacements, an office block. So more drones can sit in front of computer screens all day and help keep a financial business ticking over. Corporate profits and the pursuit of wealth for its own sake, sitting on the site of so many personal memories and cultural moments, all about to be cast away in the name of ‘progress’.
I had one of my first handholding experiences there. Body tingling with excitement as we touched skin while watching a film. It was where I rendezvoused with ex-uni housemates for weekly catch-ups on special offer nights. It was where I took refuge for a night’s distraction with a blockbuster movie the night before hearing the (thankfully, positive) outcome of my mother’s MRI scan. The site of so many little human moments, all about to disappear, as though it were never there.
It’s not like Belfast will be left without any cinemas. But, that part of the city will, and at a time where everyone is lamenting the death of the high street and town centres, it seems…wrong to do away with a cultural hub for a glorified computer lab.
I see it even more starkly in my home town of Ballymena. Shop after shop, including long-standing, multi-generational family businesses, mutilated down to a fraction of their previous size, or obliterated altogether. Hairdressers and charity shops the only places to buck the trend. Falling away one after another, like a slow-motion game of dominoes, and rendering the town that little bit more unrecognisable each time.
What to do? To halt the spread of decay threatening to strip our towns and small cities of any distinctiveness, or quality, or charm? What to do to stem a tide that seems to get hungrier and hungrier with each bit of society it successfully erodes?
I think community has got to be at the heart of it. At the heart of preserving the character and the concept of the ‘town’. If we don’t all want to end up locked away like recluses in our homes, ordering all that we need and want online, we have to embrace something beyond just retail and profit for their own merit. When I think of where I spend most of my time in Ballymena, it’s in the places that form an ‘experience’, not just a purchase.
The library, with its writing and reading groups. Locally-owned cafes, where the baristas know your order by heart. The leisure centre, with its dual fitness and social benefits. And, indeed, the local cinema. There’s one thing all of these places have in common with one another. One advantage all of them, as experiences, enjoy over their more solitary and less personalised alternatives. Something we all need as human beings, and which we could all do with embracing as a counter to the ever-increasing coldness of much of human society.
Warmth.
That, I believe, is the sensation that will draw people, young and old, back to towns as a physical space. Back to a sense of community and the ‘group’. I see the success to be had in embracing it in small, individual ways every single day. How to channel it more widely will be for experts to decide.
To finish this piece as I started, with a personal anecdote, I frequently think about my grandmother’s mind in her later years, and the contrast between days she spent in the house, and days she spent in town. On the former, there would almost inevitably be a sense of gloom and even depression in the house, if she’d decided not to go out. But on the latter, if I arrived for a visit and saw her taking off her coat, and setting down shopping bags, catching her breath from the walk home, and the conversations with friends and neighbours she’d encountered on her way… The house would have a wholly different atmosphere to it. Not one of gloom, not one of isolation…
But, one of warmth.
Christopher Moore is a Northern Irish writer, and a graduate of English from Queen’s University Belfast, as well as the MA in TV Fiction Writing at Glasgow Caledonian University. Alongside a number of playwriting achievements, including being longlisted for the 2019 Bruntwood Prize, he has had a number of pieces of short fiction published in the UK, Ireland and US over the last few years.