Tour The Candahar
Credit: Courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
The Candahar is a creative amalgam of at least three Belfast pubs, only one of which (at the time of writing) still exists.
The pub is probably the archetypal pseudo-public space in Belfast. What else is there to do? Where else is there to go?
The Candahar operates in a certain kind of cinematic sense, by being specifically unlike the world upon which it has so clearly and carefully been based.
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery
I want to insist, at the risk of trying the reader’s patience, on certain difficulties and instabilities that operate within The Candahar at a conceptual level. If it was simply about having a beer, we could all just go to the pub.
…the same place years later, is the site of a feeling that they spend many hours trying to recover.
I used to think that I could not leave Belfast. Many people told me I’d stayed too long, that the place was too small, too backward, too out of the way, that I should be somewhere else, but I disagreed because my whole life was so heavily invested in the place.
On the 9th of February 1996, the day the Provisional IRA ended a 17-month ceasefire by bombing the Canary Wharf office complex in London, I sat with Theo Sims in a basement pub next door to the Crown, watching news footage of the bomb on TV while wondering whether to order another drink.