New Lodge, Belfast

The New Lodge (Irish: Lóiste Nua) is an urban, working class Catholic community in Belfast, Northern Ireland, immediately to the north of the city centre. The landscape is dominated by several large tower blocks. The area has a number of murals, mostly sited along the New Lodge Road. The locality is demarcated by Duncairn Gardens, Antrim Road, Clifton Street, and dependent on opinion, York Street or North Queen Street. North Queen Street and Duncairn Gardens have often seen rioting between republicans and loyalists. The New Lodge is also an electoral ward of Belfast City Council.

The area now known as the New Lodge was once open farmland within the original 17th-century city walls of the town of Belfast.

The name of the area probably derives from the farm lodge at Solitude, now the location of the home ground of Cliftonville F.C.. The Old Lodge Road, now largely demolished, ran from Peter's Hill to the bottom of the Oldpark Road, while the New Lodge Road would have continued along the line of the modern Cliftonville Road.

With Belfast's explosive expansion as an industrial city in the 19th century, the New Lodge developed as a built up, inner-City area; its residents came from both the Protestant and Catholic communities. The area between Lepper Street and the Antrim Road was largely filled with slum housing for the workers in the Lepper Mill, while the area between York Street and North Queen Street provided the same standard of accommodation for workers in the Gallagher tobacco factory and York Street Mill on York Street.

The area between the New Lodge Road and Duncairn Gardens was historically occupied by the better-off working-class families, while Duncairn Gardens itself and Clifton Street were upmarket well into the 20th century.

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