What do you think of when someone says Derry? Most likely the excellent sit com Derry Girls, but try and think about the place not the show. Invoking the name of any place brings certain thoughts to mind. It’s worth taking some time to examine these thoughts to make sure that our thinking isn’t guided by stereotypes or outdated information. 

So how can we think about Derry? We can think of Derry as a historic British city. It has plenty of history and is in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has around the same population as Carlisle, a comparison that invokes a place of a certain size and character. Also, like Carlisle, Derry is a regional hub and the only large city in a large rural area. 

Other British cities around the same size as Derry are Gloucester, Winchester and Exeter. This company conveys a different image of a city. A place that is historic, metropolitan but not too metropolitan, picturesque, big enough to have more than one Tesco and several microbreweries. All these things are true about Derry, but the way we think about Derry is not the same as how we think about Carlisle, Gloucester, Winchester and Exeter. 

A historic British city 

So, why don’t we think about Derry in the same way that we think about other historic British cities? Derry has beautiful historic buildings such as the Guildhall and Medieval Town Walls. It dates to the Plantation of Ulster, when Protestants moved over from Scotland to Northern Ireland. 

Derry was originally a monastery in the Middle Ages, involved in the Tudor conquest of Ireland, the Siege of Derry took place here in 1689 and the city was important during the Second World War. During the war, Derry was the UK and the Allies’ most Westerly port and thus where American conveys would arrive. Derry was also key to the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.

A modern British city

When thinking about Derry we shouldn’t let it be defined by its history. We can think of Derry as a modern, urban hub in a largely rural part of the country. Here the comparison to Carlisle is apt. Derry has good restaurants, bars and nightlife. Craft beer has yet to take off, but a range of enjoyable local ales as well as an interesting selection of beers from the Republic of Ireland are available in most bars.

Like most regional centres, Derry has interesting pieces of public art and modern architecture. There is the Hands Across the Divide sculpture, by Maurice Harron, and three impressive bridges across the River Foyle. There’s the Craigavon Bridge the oldest, the Foyle Bridge, which looks majestic when viewed from the river bank, and the Peace Bridge a striking curved footbridge that neatly complements the city centre. There are also murals and other pieces of public art, including the Derry Girls mural, as well as a striking modern train station.

Culture and celebrations

As a regional centre of culture, Derry hosts festivals and celebrations. Halloween is enjoyed more enthusiastically in Derry than anywhere else in the UK. When I was there every single shop, pub and hotel foyer were meticulously decorated for the occasion.

Screens around the city projected videos of Halloween characters that also reflected Celtic mythology. These were pitched at the right level of creepiness so that they weren’t naff but also weren’t too scary for most children. Music was played in public squares, whilst Halloween markets and club nights took place over an entire weekend of celebration. There is even a skeleton on the city’s shield.

Recent history

Using these parameters, we can think about Derry in the same way as any other historic or modern British City. So why don’t we? When I first asked you to think about Derry, I doubt that historic buildings, modern bridges or festivals came to mind.

When thinking about Derry it feels like a mis-categorisation or unfair to the city to include it in the same bracket as Exeter, Gloucester or even Carlisle. True, all cities are unique, but Derry stands apart from its British counterparts.

The reason is simple, Derry’s recent history casts a long shadow over any thinking about it as a place. Its medieval history and modern architecture are equal to that of Exeter or Carlisle, but it seems to be a betrayal of its recent history to foreground these when discussing the city of Derry. 

The totality of history

When we think about Derry, do we think about the demonstrations of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association being first banned and then blocked by the force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1968? Do we think about the 1969 Battle of the Bogside, between Catholic residents and the police, which according to some accounts was the start of the Troubles? Do we think about the shooting dead of 14 unarmed civilians by paratroopers on Bloody Sunday in 1972?

These events took place before I was born, but this is what first comes to mind when I think about Derry. Do population, historic buildings, landmarks and nightlife cease to be relevant when weighted against such events? No place should be defined by one aspect of its history.

I am not for a moment suggesting that we forget about the Troubles. What I’m asking is when we’re thinking about Derry, or are thinking about how we think about Derry, are such events to be the totality of what we consider? Should we focus on what makes Derry different, rather than what makes it like other British cities?

Wildfire

Derry’s recent past is never far away. Driving through the suburbs I spied graffiti saying “No Irish Sea Border” and “Fuck Boris” on suburban walls. Recent tensions lurk beneath the surface, like the painful collective memories of the sisters in 2020’s Wildfire (set in a community on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland).

In the film, the buried trauma of sisters Kelly and Lauren is stirred up by Kelly’s return from a period of vagrancy and her disruptive presence upsets the fragile stability of Lauren’s life. Set to a backdrop of news stories about Brexit possibly creating a hard border on the Ireland of Ireland and with flashbacks to the sister’s childhood during the Troubles, the trauma of the family’s past and the disruption that Kelly causes serve as a metaphor for Northern Ireland’s fragile peace and tested constitutional arrangements. It shows how this sits atop painful recent history that can be sent tumbling out of control by unexpected chaotic forces.

Different and the same

It’s easy to think of Derry as different to other British cities. In many ways it is. The cities I mentioned above, Carlisle, Exeter, etc., are different because – and you have probably been yelling this at the screen for a while - they’re English and not in Northern Ireland. However, in many ways, the city is the same as the rest of the country and other cities in the Western world. There’s still Guinness and chain supermarkets, which have touched every corner of the Earth.

A recent Unite Against Racism rally demanding open borders after the drowning of migrants shows that Derry is having the same debates as the rest of the Western world. What to do about refugees and borders in the age of looming climate disasters? How do we be less racist in the 21st century? The debate continues from Derry to Doncaster to Denver.

Everywhere has history 

Every city is full of contradictions, controversies and has a complex identity. In Derry they are closer to the surface as they draw on recent history. I’m from Leicester, where we never stop reminding visitors that a King was found in a car park here - apart from when we win the odd football tournament.

We forget that this event was the culmination of a traumatic and bloody civil war that divided communities and killed huge numbers of people. The pain has faded over the centuries to the point it has been buried, resurfaced, propagandised, memorialised, romanticised, debated and finally turned into a novelty mug sold in a gift shop. Is this the fate that eventually awaits Derry’s history? Maybe, if the way that every other city treats its own complex history is anything to go by.

How we think about a place when we think about a place

Derry is a more complex place to be characterised by its most famous sitcom or most well-known historic events. Is it important to acknowledge what makes every place special and not to forget the tragedies of recent history, but it’s also important to remember what we all have in common, which can easily be forgotten when considering the highly charged emotional events of living memory.

We should be conscious of how we think about a place when we think about a place so that we don’t get trapped into the same endless cycle of historic thinking, and never to open our minds to new possibilities or a place’s ever-evolving identity.