The Bogside

The Bogside, in Derry, is quite the famous area, being more or less in the epicentre of the Civil Rights Marches in the late 1960s.  The famous Rossville Flats are long gone but the area retains much of its history with murals and the Free Derry Wall (the back of which is visible at the bottom centre of this first shot):

Looking over the Bog towards St Eugene's Cathedral.  I was standing on Derry's Walls when taking this shot, on rather a dreary day as you can tell.  The hills of Donegal are just visible in the distance. On Foma 133 Classic paper.

Free Derry Wall is the gable end of what was once a row of houses.  On one side is usually printed 'You are now entering Free Derry' but the message changes on occasion to fit various topical events.  Recently it read 'You are now entering code red for humanity' during the COP26 world conference on Climate Change.  During Covid the words 'We salute all our key NHS workers' were added. 

Nowadays the Bogside is something of a local attraction - tour buses regularly stop here for folk to see the murals and take photographs.  You can see one of the Bogside murals painted on another house just to the left of the wall - this one depicts Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey) using a megaphone addressing crowds in the Bogside.  In 1969 she was elected to parliament at the age of 21 - the youngest MP at the time and the youngest ever woman MP until 2015.  The murals (there are 12 in total) are the work of three local men.

I panned left a bit and took another shot:

Looking up Westland Street (on the right)

As you can see, the Bogside is a place of high-density housing, much of what is (or was) Council-owned and would have been a place of social deprivation and high unemployment.  Still is.  For many years Derry has had the highest unemployment rate of any UK city, running at more than twice the level of other cities in Northern Ireland.  Change is slow but there is a burgeoning Digital Economy in the city and the University Campus is expanding at a rate of knots - it now has a medical school.  Things are better than they were, although obviously there's still a way to go.

I placed the shots side-by-side to give more of a panoramic look: