The Riverwatch Aquarium and a Dugout Canoe

This small, and as its name might suggest, mainly freshwater aquarium is located on the outskirts of the city just a few minutes drive from the Craigavon Bridge, heading towards Strabane.

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Hands Across the Divide

In choosing a feature picture for my introductory Derry review I choose a picture of this sculpture (the one above) as it is a memorial to nothing, a commemoration of nothing but rather a work that sides with nobody and asks one to look forward to the future with hope and high expectation.

An Angel in The Fountain

Fountain Estate (or The Fountain) is the last remaining Protestant community on Londonderry’s (as the approximately 500 Loyalist residents most assuredly call it) cityside. A Unionist island in a Nationalist sea, if you will.

Austins – The World’s Oldest Department Store

While this review is about a department store I have rarely had cause to shop here – my interest is in its history. I detest shopping.

Very few of my readers will have heard of Austins Department Store.

War Memorial – On the Diamond

The square at the centre of the walled City of Derry, the point at which the four main streets from the four original city gates converge, is called the Diamond and is the former location of various civic buildings and a market. In fact, three former town halls were located here. In 1904 a fire in Austin’s Department store on the Diamond (the building behind the war Memorial in picture one attached) also destroyed the town hall from which point the Diamond then hosted a small garden.

The Peace Bridge across the Foyle”

The Peace Bridge, a 235m long cycle and foot self anchored suspension bridge across the River Foyle is a recent addition to the city’s landscape.

Free Derry Wall

On 5 January 1969, some two hundred and eighty years after a lowly apprentice boy had shouted the immortal words, “No Surrender”, from Derry’s City Walls and slammed the city gates shut in the face of James IIs army, a local republican activist, John “Cacker” Casey, painted the equally immortal words “You are now entering Free Derry” on the gable wall of a house in the Bogside and the barricades went up.

Republican Paramilitary Memorials

At various points in the city, if you keep your eyes peeled you will come across plaques, erected by the Derry Republican Graves Association, to Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers killed in the Northern Ireland “Troubles” – the term used to describe the 30 years of conflict between 1969 and 2000 which tore the protestant and catholic or unionist and republican communities apart.

Hunger Strike Memorial

Growing up in Northern Ireland at the time, I have very vivid memories of the 1981 hunger strike which lasted 217 days and resulted in the death of 10 republican prisoners.

The People’s Gallery

Background to the Murals

Many of the most significant events in Northern Ireland’s Troubles were played out in Derry and indeed right here in the Bogside.

Throughout the Troubles the creation of sectarian murals by both the Catholic (nationalist) and Protestant (unionist) sides, particularly though not exclusively in Belfast and Derry, was seen as a key strategy in each side’s propaganda campaign. These building sized murals, often not for the faint hearted, told it as it was (from the creators perspective, of course) and added a bit – often a big bit for good measure.