YARD EXHIBITION ON CONFIANCE
The MV Confiance will be open to the public on 12th May 2007.
There is no doubt that the River Lagan is recapturing something of its former glory. There may never again be tens of thousands of shipyard workers building the world's greatest ships but vibrant energy is definitely returning to its river banks, adjacent streets and public precincts. Amidst dazzling new buildings and some beautiful old ones, the hugely successful Titanic Festival has just ended. During the week long programme hoards of tourists from every corner of the world mingled with local visitors to savour the Lagan's history and scenery. Last Saturday, across from the 95 year old Nomadic, Custom House Square was packed with May Day marchers and union activists; the riverside square itself was once in a river. The workers marched with their banners and music over to the already crowded St George's Market; there has been a market there since the seventeenth century, originally selling imported goods from the fledgling docks. By sundown the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival was in full swing, as were hundreds of youthful "wall jumpers" and quayside skate boarders. This part of the river has become a fully fledged often densely populated open air community centre. During Monday's various marathon events the Lagan tow path became a toe path for 150,000 toes belonging to fifteen thousand pairs of blistered feet battling bravely along the embankment to Ormeau Park. "Dancing on Ice" down at the Odyssey Centre beside Abercorn Basin was recently sold out with Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean on their skates, then Sir James Galway with his golden flute, and soon the Harlem Globetrotters with their "vertical slam dunks"! All of this and more is only a trotter's leap from Hamilton Dry Dock's bulbous caisson (gate) which opened and closed on hundreds of ships including the nearby Nomadic. The recently published book "Turning the Tide for Belfast" explains the river's extraordinary reincarnation thus; "since 1989 Laganside has been transformed into a vibrant waterfront which has brought in more than £1 billion of investment, attracted over 14,700 jobs, brought people back to live in the city and helped put Belfast back on its feet and into the holiday brochures." This coming weekend brings further confirmation of the Lagan's rebirth with four river-related events; the Waterfront Hall's tenth birthday, the second Lagan Boat Rally, the Merchant Navy Service in St Georges Parish Church and the "YARD" exhibition on Lagan Legacy's Dutch barge, the Confiance. "If rivers could talk," states the Confiance's exhibition programme, "the River Lagan might tell the greatest story never told. But the Lagan and her sons are humble, so her mighty armada of Belfast-built ships are mostly uncelebrated." Lagan Legacy's barge MV Confiance speaks for the river on which she floats, and for the men and women who moulded the riverbanks into unique maritime memory banks. Confiance holds the old, the gone and forgotten, returned to Belfast this Saturday from 1 o'clock to 5pm. The images, artefacts and stories that make up the "YARD" exhibition have a life of their own. There's a cinema on board screening vintage Lagan film dating back to the early 1900s. In flickering black and white Belfast's maritime past returns in an apt setting - the hold of a barge moored beside the Waterfront Hall. Central to the "YARD" exhibition are fifty entrancing old photographs; a pressure driven hydraulic press being operated by a riveting champion in Harland and Wolff. In keeping with "Lagan humour" the hydraulic press was aptly nicknamed "the Nutcracker"! Joiners chalking the outline of a ship on the floor of the mould loft ("screeving loft") which was in fact a full scale drawing board the size of the ship! There's a poignant picture taken in 1949 showing an upholsterer working on a ship's armchair in the upholsterers' workshop; poignant because he was eighty three years old and still working. Another image shows cloth being measured for cutting; Harland and Wolff manufactured virtually everything that went into their ships, excepting raw goods like the woven material, which would have been bought in. Displayed alongside the pictures in the Confiance are original shipyard tools, artefacts, ships plans and shipyard office equipment. The exhibition is open from 1pm this Saturday. The Lagan Boat Rally begins at Ravenhill Reach at 12 noon.