Derry in Old Photographs

The famous walled plantation town occupies the site of a sixth-century Columban monastery. A town grew up around the monastery and by the thirteenth century Derry was a diocesan centre. But its modern history dates from the seventeenth century. Its history echoes that of Ulster in general. The Protestant plantation town withstood the famous Jacobite siege of 1689: thereafter it stood as a symbol of Protestant defiance while gradually attracting a Catholic population to areas outside the walls, like the Bogside. While the political history of the modern city is well known, its social history, that which tended to unite rather than divide, is less often celebrated. That is what this book does, in pictures. The earliest image dates from 1872, but most of the material covers the years from the 1930s to the 1960s. These glimpses of the city's past and of the people who made it embrace commercial life, sport, music (for which the city is justly famous) and the other aspects of the ordinary daily round. It also records the dreadful poverty of old, as well as the embittered politics.
Art Byrne and Sean McMahon have assembled a remarkably wide selection of images, all of them drawn from private sources and most of them never seen before in print.