Derry, or Londonderry (Ir.
Doire, ‘place of the oaks’), Northern Ireland, commanding the west bank of the Foyle estuary. The site of a monastery founded by
Colum Cille, which was destroyed by the
Vikings, modern Derry was founded by Sir Henry
Docwra in 1600. The charter granted to London companies in 1613 (see
ulster plantation) allowed the prefix ‘London’ to be added: Londonderry remains the official name of the city, and is preferred by unionists. Although the nationalist majority changed the name of the local authority to Derry city council in 1978, the British government refused permission to change the name of the city itself.
Derry's formidable stone walls, completed in 1618, mark it out as the last fortified city to be built in western Europe. During the
Williamite War Protestant resistance to the armies of
James II in the 105‐day siege of
Derry, after
Apprentice Boys had closed the city gates, was a decisive moment in European history. Again the city played a key role, as the centre of communications for the North Atlantic campaign, during the
Second World War. With these exceptions Derry's history has been that of an ethnic frontier at the economic margin. The modest success of the port, and the city's role as a source of cheap female labour for the
shirt making industry, caused the population to double, to 40,000, during the second half of the 19th century. But Derry was unable to emulate
Belfast's economic diversification and take‐off, nor did it generate large‐scale male employment. Although the population doubled again during the 20th century, the economic story was downbeat.
The siege made Derry a symbol of Protestant power in Ulster: for unionists it remains ‘the maiden city’. But Catholics were a majority of the population well before 1900, and during the 20th century Protestant power was maintained with difficulty. To immense Catholic disappointment, the
Boundary Commission kept the city within Northern Ireland in 1925, and only gross gerry‐mandering preserved Unionist control of the city council until 1973. This required a local housing policy restricting Catholics to tenancies in the overcrowded South Ward, and reluctance at
Stormont to promote any growth in the city: in 1965, for instance, the city's Magee College was passed over as the site for a new university in favour of the market town of Coleraine. Driven by such grievances, and by its very rapid population growth in the 1950s and 1960s, Catholic Derry was primed to explode. The renewed
Northern Ireland conflict began there with the televised police violence of 5 October 1968, and continued with the ‘battle of the Bogside’ (Aug. 1969) and
‘Bloody Sunday’ (Jan. 1972). Under
direct rule housing in a small city, if not employment, was a problem which the British state had the resources to solve. In the 1970s Catholic Derry expanded northwards and the Protestants moved east: a new sectarian terminology of ‘west bank’ and ‘east bank’ emerged to describe the now river‐divided city. By the 1990s it seemed that a precarious new equilibrium had been reached, with restabilized ethnic boundaries, improved housing, and increased investment, mainly in consumer services and in a massive expansion of Magee College.
Bibliography
Lacy, Brian , Siege City: The Story of Derry and Londonderry (1990)
A. C. Hepburn
