The State Of Belfast: housing exhibition explores ongoing crisis

In an exhibition running at Belfast cultural hub The MAC until September 21, housing rights group Take Back the City are attempting to show how we reached such a state of crisis for this essential public good, while providing possible remedies to the issue. It’s called The State Of Belfast.

The State Of Belfast: exposing the realities of class and racial discrimination

The group describes itself as a coalition “formed…to develop sustainable solutions to Belfast’s housing crisis” supported by experts in architecture, urban planning, human rights and other relevant fields.

The exhibition – entitled The State of Belfast, and taking up multiple floors of the building across several galleries – uses the Steve McQueen artwork ‘Grenfell’ as a “jumping off point”. The fire that took place in that building, the worst in Britain since World War II, saw the loss 72 lives, an act of mass manslaughter through corporate and government negligence. Despite the greed and mendacity of those providing the building’s highly flammable cladding, and the criminal disregard for residents’ concerns shown by the local council, no one is yet to be jailed for the outrage. Screenings of the film can be found on The MAC’s third floor.

Grenfell provided a brutal lesson in how housing can expose the realities of class and racial discrimination, along with the structural violence that takes place when something as fundamental as shelter is treated as a commodity:

Chronicling the sectarian history of housing in the North of Ireland

While no direct equivalent of the disaster in London exists in the recent past in the North of Ireland, those same injustices are sharply felt in their own way here.

A timeline that fills three walls of the exhibition space lays this out, chronicling the sectarian history of housing, from Cromwell driving vast numbers of Catholics from their homes in the 1600s, through the Penal Laws that restricted land ownership and inheritance on the same religious basis, and to the waves of ‘burning out’ Catholics were subjected to in the last century:

While the sectarian divide still has not been fully resolved in housing, current maladies of class inequality and racism have now also come to the fore. The chronology outlines the dismal process of social homes being sold off since the early 1980s, from 34% of six counties households in social tenancies in 1974, to just 14% today. This evisceration of the social housing stock has left 49,083 on the Northern Ireland Housing Executive waiting list, a Thatcherite policy familiar to those in England, Scotland, and Wales:

Meanwhile, asylum seekers often face substandard housing, destitution through homelessness, or placement in a hotel. The latter, despite being a wholly inadequate form of long-term dwelling, is routinely portrayed as some form of luxury by the right-wing press. Thus, the least privileged in society are pitted against each other competing for a resource that should not be scarce in the first place. This underlying tension can be seen as one factor catalysing the racist pogroms that have taken place in Sandy Row and Ballymena in 2024 and 2025.

Mackie’s Masterplan

The centrepiece of the exhibition features Take Back the City’s template for resolving the issues around housing in Belfast – what it calls the ‘Mackie’s Masterplan‘. On a particular kind of damp and grey autumn day, the decaying former industrial landscape in west Belfast resembles something from the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker:

It has been left mostly unattended for over 20 years, in an area of the city crying out for new housing. The ambitious redevelopment plan would see the creation of 578 new homes including those built to a Passivhaus standard, a small hydro-electric plant using the nearby Forth River, a city farm, shops, communal allotments and an employment quarter. Drawn up in collaboration with Matthew Lloyd Architects, the goal of the project is to offer a pathway towards resolving the housing crisis in a sustainable way. The project has yet to receive approval, and as part of the interactive exhibition, visitors are encouraged to leave feedback on the project, and on the broader themes of housing inequality.

On the ground floor in The Sunken Gallery screenings of the Marta Dyczkowska film Hearsay at Point Zero can be found, which The MAC describes as exploring: