Creggan was a planning solution to a political problem. By 1945, Derry's Catholic population was wedged into the Bogside in housing that had not been built for as many people as it now held. Two and three families to a house was not unusual. The city council, which Protestant gerrymandering kept in unionist hands, was reluctant to build new estates in unionist wards because rehousing Catholic families there would have shifted the electoral balance. The compromise was to build a new estate uphill from the Bogside, in the same wards, that could absorb the overflow without changing anything else. Creggan went up between 1946 and the mid-1950s. The houses were small, the streets were laid out efficiently, and the new residents brought with them the dense neighbourly culture of the streets they had left. By the early 1960s Creggan and the Bogside together were home to more than thirty thousand people.

When the civil rights movement spread out from the Bogside in the late 1960s, Creggan went with it. After British troops introduced internment without trial in August 1971, the entire neighbourhood, together with the Bogside, became a no-go area where the RUC and the British Army could not enter without expecting an ambush. Barricades closed the streets. The two wings of the IRA, Official and Provisional, divided control by street and family. In those years Creggan was both a community and a fortress. Children grew up tracking which kind of soldier was on which corner. Mothers learned which doorways to use to cross between houses without being seen from the watchtowers. The no-go status ended with Operation Motorman on 31 July 1972, when British bulldozers came up the hill in the pre-dawn hours and the barricades came down. After Motorman, Creggan returned to formal British control. The bitterness about how that control was exercised did not.

Derry City Cemetery, which opened in 1853 on the west edge of the estate, holds Creggan's longest memory. There are 194 Commonwealth War Graves from the two World Wars in one section, marking the Derry men who served in British uniforms in both conflicts. There is a republican plot in another section where Patsy O'Hara of the INLA and Michael Devine of the INLA, both of whom died on the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, are buried. Martin McGuinness, who was second-in-command of the Provisional IRA Derry Brigade on Bloody Sunday in 1972 and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to 2017, was buried in the same plot in 2017. The contrast between the war graves and the republican plot, less than a hundred metres apart, holds in compressed form the entire argument of twentieth-century Irish history. Funerals at the cemetery still draw enormous crowds. The headstones still get visited.

On the night of 18 April 2019, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist named Lyra McKee was standing near a PSNI Land Rover on Fanad Drive in Creggan, watching a riot. A masked gunman of the New IRA, the dissident republican group that did not accept the Good Friday Agreement, opened fire toward the police vehicle. One of his bullets passed through her head. She died at Altnagelvin Hospital that night. She was an out lesbian, a writer celebrated for her work on the missing children of the Troubles, engaged to be married. The New IRA initially denied responsibility, then admitted it, then offered what it called sincere apologies, then carried on. Vigils took place at Fanad Drive and outside Belfast City Hall. Her funeral, in St Anne's Cathedral, drew political leaders from across Ireland and the United Kingdom together for the first time in many years. The trial of three men accused over her killing continued into 2026. Creggan, again, was in the headlines for the worst possible reason.

It would be a mistake to read Creggan only through its losses. The estate produced Dana Rosemary Scallon, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 and later became a member of the European Parliament; Mickey Bradley, bass guitarist with The Undertones; the Olympic boxer Charlie Nash; the Olympic swimmer Liam Ball; the writer Don Mullan; the footballers Tony O'Doherty and James McClean; and the actor and playwright voices that have carried Creggan's accent into theatres on three continents. The estate today has a country park at the old reservoir, a sports centre at Bishop's Field, and a play park where there used to be derelict ground. Census data still ranks Creggan Central as the eleventh most deprived ward in Northern Ireland out of 582. The work of becoming a more comfortable place is still going on. The graves in the cemetery still get fresh flowers.