Our playground was Upton Cottages and Arizona Street

IN March 2017, an ‘Arizona Street and Upton Cottages reunion party’ was held in the Glenowen. It was a great event, with fantastic music provided by the McCourt brothers, and some equally impressive socialising done by the McKays, McDonalds, Quinns, McAteers, Pattersons, Monaghans, Lintons... and plenty of others, including a couple of Deedses.
The oldest party-goer was Mrs Sheila Deane, at a brave 90 years of age. I got speaking to Mrs Deane that night and as always, she had a smile on her face and was in good spirits. Sadly, Mrs Deane passed away on January 3 this year.
The street was our playground growing up in Arizona Street/Upton Cottage in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We were never in. While our parents probably appreciated this, I’m not sure that all of the older residents enjoyed the noise and occasional nuisance as much. Some of our older neighbours when passing might have greeted us young ones with no more than a scowl, a grunt, or even worse (naming no names). Mrs Deane however, was friendly and approachable every time you saw her. Uniquely as well, she always remembered my name. My brothers and I were very good friends with Mrs Deane’s grandsons Neil, David and Mark, just down the street. Every night since I can remember, their dad Seamus made the short trek up the street past our house to visit his mum in the cottages. I spoke to Seamus recently and he kindly shared some of his own, earlier childhood memories of our wee street.
Mr and Mrs Deane moved in to number 1 Upton Cottages on the Glen Road in 1953, and at that time the street was still not too dissimilar from the way it looked when the houses were first built. Upton Cottages first appears in Belfast Street directories in 1895, when they formed the only small terrace resembling a street anywhere in West Belfast beyond the Falls Road. At that time, and for almost another 50 years, the area beyond Upton Cottages marked the start of the country, and there was very little to be found after it going up the Glen Road apart from farms and fields. The single-sided Arizona Drive appears in the street directories for the first time in 1916, with the opposite side and new name of Arizona Street listed the following year. Several other homes of varying size soon began to spring up along the Glen Road around the growing parish of St Teresa’s. Gransha and Andersonstown estates followed shortly after and the whole area became much less rural in character. One former resident of Woodland House on the Upper Springfield Road remembered walking down the Turf Loney to go to Sunday school on the Glen Road in the 1930s, only to be chased back across the stream at Upton Cottages for being ‘country children’!
Still, in 1953 the area was unrecognisable from how it looks today. Beyond the cottages was all fields going right up from the Falls to Hannahstown Hill. Before Turf Lodge was built to meet the rapidly increasing demand for social housing in West Belfast, Seamus Deane remembers playing from dawn to dusk in the meadows there throughout his childhood. Arizona Street, Seamus recalls, was still only three quarters built in the ‘50s. In fact, the house that I grew up in near the top, and any others after number 29, were built around a decade later. These were known as the ‘corporation houses’, having been appended to the existing houses by the council in the ‘60s. In the 1950s Sheila Deane and her family looked out at a single four bedroom house – number 2 Upton Cottages and the first on that side – beside which was Sheriff’s timber yard (listed as providing “Sawing, Turning and Moulding” in the 1951 directory, then as a “Furniture Manufacturer” in 1960). Both sites would later be taken up by McErlean’s Bakery that employed generations of the area’s youth. Before the bakery was built however, long piles of timber from Sheriff’s yard lay in the field between the Deanes’ house and the bottom half of Arizona Street. The vacant ground beside it, part of which would one day become our back garden, was the site of the annual bonfire. According to one older resident, there had been an orchard there in even earlier times. Geraldine Mallon (née Bell) who told me this was someone I was heart scared of as a child. She and the neighbour facing her, Jim Butler, were tortured by us kids kicking balls and hitting sliotars around their doors. And they were never too slow in coming out to tell us to take them away to hell’s gates. Ironically, both Jim and Geraldine became good neighbours of mine when I got older and moved in beside them, and we stayed friendly until they passed away in recent years.
Other former residents of Upton Cottages include members of the RIC, a private in the Free State Army and two soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War, one of whom is among the Canadian Infantry buried in the City Cemetery.
And the street keeps changing. Like so many other families, Mrs Deane’s children and grandchildren are scattered near and far. Her sons Paul and Seamus continued to make their daily pilgrimage up our street back home to see their mum until her final days. This special lady won’t be forgotten, nor will our memories of a grand wee community – one of the last of its kind – that has spread out across our beautiful former meadows from the Falls to Hannahstown, and further afield.