URBAN RENEWAL:Belfast artists, cafe owners and architects are finding ways of reviving the city's relationship with the River Lagan, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH

LIKE MANY CITIES, Belfast once turned its face away from its river, the reeking tidal Lagan. The focus of the city’s energy was the docks and shipyards. More recently, post-conflict Belfast has been busy reinventing itself as a glossy shopping destination, intent on shepherding people on a retail circuit from one shopping centre to another.

Now a new project, housed in a 60-year-old Dutch barge moored at Lanyon Quay, close to Queen’s Bridge, aims to breathe new life into the neglected riverfront. The MV Confiance has been turned into a floating maritime museum and a new artist-led cafe bar – the Galley – is transforming it into an exciting cultural destination.

The food is scrumptious: there are big, bounteous platters of cheese and prosciutto and pork pies, and little pots of strawberries soaked in vodka. As you stare out of a porthole at the terns swooping and diving on the river – which, since the building of the Lagan weir some years ago, is a much cleaner and less pungent waterway – you feel as if you’re about to set off on a journey.

That’s the charm of the barge but, more than that, the Galley is intended as a place where people can meet, eat and talk about new possibilities for the creative regeneration of the city.

Artists and curators Rachel Brown and Brighdin Farren – known collectively as Brown and Brí – were inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant called Food in 1970s New York. It was staffed by artists and envisaged as something between a perpetual dinner party and a living, breathing, pot-clanging artwork.

“We have always been interested in holding events around food; the social interactions that can only happen over food,” says Brown. Farren says that “it’s about using food as a tool, as an equaliser, to get people talking. You’re creating the circumstances for people to interact.”

And they want to turn people’s heads towards the river. Frustrated by the prevailing emphasis on selling Belfast through commerce and tourism, Brown and Brí see their barge cafe as “an ambitious experiment in shifting a city centre”.

“We feel that the riverside, with its rich industrial heritage and reminders of what made Belfast great, is a very good place to begin thinking about what we produce today. We want to celebrate local talent, whether through the food we sell, the music, art and literary events, or local artisans making furniture or site-specific works.”

Brown and Farren are not the only ones concerned about the city. The Forum for Alternative Belfast – a group of architects, academics and planners, set up by architects Declan Hill and Mark Hackett – says Belfast has become a dysfunctional, disconnected place, suffering from neglect, disjointed by piecemeal development.

Hackett wants to “stitch the city together again”. He believes that “we need a fundamental restructuring and a rebuilding of urban confidence, the ambition to seek a better, more coherent city that people will want to live in.”

Hill sees missed opportunities in the way so many of the buildings on Belfast’s riverfront face away from the river, with the riverside being wasted on service or storage areas, bins and car parks. He welcomes the Galley on the barge: “It brings purpose to the riverfront, gives a reason for people to come down here.”

The fact that the barge is there at all is down to a man called Derek Booker. He’s been running boat tours on the river for years, and when he found that engineering offices at the shipyard were being bulldozed he won permission from Harland and Wolff to recover documents and artefacts: “Our maritime heritage was being destroyed. I had to do something.”

He salvaged delicate plans for liners, drawn with Indian ink on waxed linen, and old letters. He needed somewhere to exhibit his findings, so he bought the MV Confiance in Eindhoven and sailed her home. During the six-week journey Booker and the crew encountered frightening storms: “We woke up at 4am and the furniture was flying around the boat.”

And there was a ticklish moment at the end, when the barge eased its way under Queen’s Bridge – “there was an inch to spare on either side” – but they made it. “Belfast has never had its own maritime museum until now,” says Booker, “and it seems right to house it on a boat.”