Tandem

Waking a Giant
in Belfast City Hall

To enhance the tourism potential of the City Hall, Belfast City Council thought it appropriate to theme a new coffee shop area to highlight Belfast’s evolution into one of the UK’s foremost industrial cities, notably during the 19th and early 20th centuries, extending right up to the present day. The City Hall was one of the most appropriate places to pay homage to the tens of thousands of workers who helped build Belfast because it provides a tangible and unique link to our industrial past that even today is seen as a symbol of Belfast’s position in the modern world.

We were briefed to design an exhibition space that celebrated and illustrated the contribution of ordinary working people to the development of the city via their employment in the heavy industries, notably shipbuilding, engineering, rope manufacturing, linen & textile manufacture and export, tobacco processing, glass making and similar related industries. The space functions as both a coffee shop and exhibition space, so it was important to achieve a balance between the coffee shop space and a full scale interpretative exhibition. The exhibition covers a broad range of industries, from the well known to the obscure, and presents information in ‘digestable’ paragraphs, which aim to make the whole exhibition flexible in terms of the order in which it is approached, and accessible to a wide range of abilities and interests.

Central to the exhibition are two curved walls facing each other, telling the story of Belfast at the start of the 17th century and the story of Belfast’s biggest, and interlinked, industries that produced linen, iron, ships and rope. A high-level timeline featuring key industrial dates in the history of Belfast runs across three walls in the room and is of a size and position to be viewable from any part of the coffee shop, remaining visible even if the coffee shop is full. A main feature of the space is the stunning ‘Faces’ wall, which features a blend of portraits of the well-known businessmen and industrial figureheads, combined with striking images of the anonymous workers at the shipyards and foundries, mills and factories. The wall itself consists of 68 individual boxes of differing depths, with the faces literally representing the building blocks that make up the city.

Scope

Allocating and prioritising budget to various and most appropriate delivery mechanisms

Scripting and copywriting

Image selection

Design of space and interpretation

Lighting & colour scheme consultation

Production of still image movies