"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." RLS
While this review is about a department store I have rarely had cause to shop here – my interest is in its history. I detest shopping.
Very few of my readers will have heard of Austins Department Store. Continue reading “Austins – The World’s Oldest Department Store”
The square at the centre of the walled City of Derry, the point at which the four main streets from the four original city gates converge, is called the Diamond and is the former location of various civic buildings and a market. In fact, three former town halls were located here. In 1904 a fire in Austin’s Department store on the Diamond (the building behind the war Memorial in picture one attached) also destroyed the town hall from which point the Diamond then hosted a small garden. Continue reading “War Memorial – On the Diamond”
The Peace Bridge, a 235m long cycle and foot self anchored suspension bridge across the River Foyle is a recent addition to the city’s landscape. Continue reading “The Peace Bridge across the Foyle””
On 5 January 1969, some two hundred and eighty years after a lowly apprentice boy had shouted the immortal words, “No Surrender”, from Derry’s City Walls and slammed the city gates shut in the face of James IIs army, a local republican activist, John “Cacker” Casey, painted the equally immortal words “You are now entering Free Derry” on the gable wall of a house in the Bogside and the barricades went up. Continue reading “Free Derry Wall”
At various points in the city, if you keep your eyes peeled you will come across plaques, erected by the Derry Republican Graves Association, to Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers killed in the Northern Ireland “Troubles” – the term used to describe the 30 years of conflict between 1969 and 2000 which tore the protestant and catholic or unionist and republican communities apart. Continue reading “Republican Paramilitary Memorials”
Growing up in Northern Ireland at the time, I have very vivid memories of the 1981 hunger strike which lasted 217 days and resulted in the death of 10 republican prisoners. Continue reading “Hunger Strike Memorial”
Background to the Murals
Many of the most significant events in Northern Ireland’s Troubles were played out in Derry and indeed right here in the Bogside.
Throughout the Troubles the creation of sectarian murals by both the Catholic (nationalist) and Protestant (unionist) sides, particularly though not exclusively in Belfast and Derry, was seen as a key strategy in each side’s propaganda campaign. These building sized murals, often not for the faint hearted, told it as it was (from the creators perspective, of course) and added a bit – often a big bit for good measure. Continue reading “The People’s Gallery”
Don’t be misled by the mural to the right of the entrance of the museum which clearly relates to the Palestinian struggle. While the people of the Bogside and most particularly civil rights activists have associated themselves with left wing, socialist struggles across the world including those in Palestine and Cuba (see picture below – noting that the Lynch relates to Che’s Irish ancestry) this museum is very focused, and bluntly so, on the history of Bogside and its immediate neighbouring areas in the second half of the 20th century with a particular focus on civil rights era of the 1960s and the Free Derry/early Troubles era of the 1970s. Continue reading “The Museum of Free Derry”
On what quickly became known as Bloody Sunday ( 30 January 1972) – no doubt echoing Dublin’s Bloody Sunday of November 1920, 13 protesters at a civil rights march were shot dead by troops from the British Army’s Parachute Regiment (1 Para). On 16 June 1972 a further protester died from wounds sustained on Bloody Sunday. This memorial on Rossville Street in the Bogside, where the deaths occurred, is to the 14 dead. Continue reading “Bloody Sunday Memorial”
What an amazing sight it must have been, over a million people on the harbour and lining the streets of Sydney for an event, 166 years in the making. Continue reading “Queen Elizabeth IIs First Landing In Australia”
The Rambling Wombat 