Lenadoon Estate

The housing here was built on a green-field site on the western edges of Belfast as new, larger, improved homes for people being moved out of the inner city’s more cramped terraced housing. Lenadoon estate was an area of significant sectarian conflict.

The IRA ceasefire of 1972 ended here when the British army blocked Republicans from moving Catholics into the lower end of the estate. The army established billets in housing accommodation and flats in the estate. Many houses were damaged by gunfire.

The new social housing stock designed and built by the NIHE was an undoubted improvement on what preceded it. Mackel remarks in his Troubles Archive Essay that “many of the houses built in that new build housing stock programme provide pleasant homes and were built to high technical standards in the brick built aesthetic of the city”; however, he goes on to observe, “but many are surrounded by walls and defensible spaces which provide little permeability or connection with neighbouring clusters of housing.”

Photograph by Brian Morrison