Qualla: Falls Road, Belfast

Falls Road, Belfast: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeanne boleyn, Public domain. Take any taxi tour of Belfast and the driver will eventually slow on a stretch of road in the lower Divis Street area, point at a five-storey wall, and let you look. Bobby Sands stares out of it - young, dark-haired, smiling slightly - above the quotation 'Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.' Sands was a Provisional IRA member who died on hunger strike in the Maze prison in May 1981 at the age of 27, having been elected an MP from his cell. The mural on the side of the Sinn Fein offices on Sevastopol Street was painted within hours of his funeral. It has been repainted many times. It is the most photographed wall in Belfast, and it is one mural among hundreds along the Falls Road, the three-mile spine of nationalist West Belfast.

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Image: Jeanne boleyn | Public domain

Falls Road, Belfast: The Road's Name

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 'Falls' has nothing to do with water. It comes from the Irish tuath na bhfal - 'territory of the enclosures' - a medieval Gaelic petty kingdom whose name attached itself to the muddy cluster of cabins outside the walls of 17th-century Belfast. By the time the city industriali...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Falls Road, Belfast: Pound Loney and the Tower

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giorgio Galeotti, CC BY 4.0. Just past the city centre, where the road begins, used to be a warren of tiny terraced streets known as the Pound Loney - the most densely populated working-class district in Ireland. In the late 1960s Belfast Corporation decided to clear it. They demolished thousands of houses a...

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Image: Giorgio Galeotti | CC BY 4.0

Falls Road, Belfast: The International Wall

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Where the Falls meets Northumberland Street stands a long brick gable known to nearly everyone in Belfast as the International Wall - a constantly-rotating display of political murals connecting West Belfast to liberation struggles around the world. Nelson Mandela has been on it....

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Falls Road, Belfast: The Mills, the Churches, the Pubs

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before politics, the Falls was an industrial street. The lower section once had nineteen working linen mills; the gable walls of two flour mills - Neill's and Andrews's - still stand. The Andrews family that built one of them came from Comber and produced both Thomas Andrews...

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Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Falls Road, Belfast: The Peace Line

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeanne boleyn, CC0. One street, Northumberland Street, cuts across the Falls. On the other side is the Shankill Road, the heart of working-class loyalist Belfast. The two communities live within shouting distance of each other and have a 22-foot 'peace wall' between them - one of more than 40 such b...

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Image: Jeanne boleyn | CC0