A fascinating new dissertation explores how guided walks through Belfast reveal the enduring relationship between memory, landscape, and identity

What if the most powerful museum in a city had no walls?

What if its exhibits were streets, intersections, pubs, housing estates, alleyways, and ordinary sidewalks?

And what if the curators were the people who lived there?

A remarkable new dissertation by Kelsey Hanson, Memoryscaping: Remembering Conflict and Constructing Mnemonic Places on Guided Walks Through Belfast, explores precisely this idea. Through guided walks with Belfast residents, Hanson examines how memories of the Troubles remain embedded within the city’s landscape, shaping how people move through, understand, and emotionally experience urban space.

The result is a fascinating exploration of a concept that extends far beyond Northern Ireland:

Places remember.

Or perhaps more accurately:

People remember through places.

The City as a Living Archive

Most visitors arrive in Belfast looking for history.

The murals.

The peace walls.

The famous political landmarks.

Yet Hanson’s research suggests that memory often resides somewhere else entirely.

Not in monuments.

But in ordinary places.

A street corner.

A bus stop.

A neighborhood pub.

A route walked thousands of times.

Throughout her fieldwork, participants returned to places connected to meaningful memories and reflected on them while physically standing in those locations. In doing so, they revealed how the city functions as a living archive layered with personal experiences, collective memories, and emotional histories.

Why Walking Matters

There is something profoundly different about learning a place on foot.

Walking slows observation.

It creates opportunities for stories to emerge naturally.

It encourages unexpected connections between landscape and memory.

Many travelers visit Belfast through traditional tours.

But walking with someone who has lived through its history offers something else entirely.

The city transforms from a collection of sites into a collection of experiences.

A building becomes a memory.

A road becomes a story.

A neighborhood becomes an emotional geography.

The Geography of Memory

One of the most intriguing ideas in the dissertation is that places can change dramatically while memories remain remarkably durable.

Participants described returning to locations decades after key events and finding that the emotional resonance remained intact, even when the physical environment had been transformed.

This phenomenon is not unique to Belfast.

Travelers experience it everywhere.

A childhood home.

A university campus.

A village visited years ago.

The landscape changes.

Yet the memories often remain vivid.

Sometimes the strongest version of a place exists not in the present but in the mind.

Beyond Belfast

Although Hanson’s work focuses on Northern Ireland, its implications are universal.

Every destination contains multiple versions of itself:

• the physical place
• the remembered place
• the imagined place
• the historical place

Travel often involves moving between these layers.

This is particularly true in destinations shaped by conflict, migration, political change, or cultural transformation.

Whether in Belfast, Sarajevo, Berlin, Medellín, Johannesburg, or Jerusalem, travelers frequently encounter landscapes where history remains visible beneath the surface.

The Ordinary Is Often the Most Powerful

One of the dissertation’s most compelling themes is the idea that ordinary places frequently carry extraordinary meaning.

Not every important memory occurs at a monument.

Many occur in places that appear unremarkable to outsiders.

A row of houses.

A neighborhood street.

A local shop.

A schoolyard.

These spaces rarely appear in guidebooks.

Yet they often contain the deepest stories.

For travelers interested in understanding a destination beyond its iconic attractions, this insight is invaluable.

Travel as Listening

At LŪM Expeditions, we often talk about the difference between seeing a place and understanding a place.

The gap between those two experiences is usually filled by stories.

The most meaningful journeys are often those where local voices help us understand the layers that exist beneath the visible landscape.

A city is never just architecture.

A landscape is never just scenery.

Places become meaningful through the experiences, memories, and relationships attached to them.

A LŪM Perspective

Many of our journeys explore destinations where history, memory, and identity remain deeply connected to place.

Whether walking through ancient Silk Road cities, villages in the Balkans, communities in Colombia, or historic neighborhoods in Europe, we are constantly reminded that landscapes hold stories far beyond what first appears.

The greatest travel experiences often emerge not from checking landmarks off a list, but from understanding how people live, remember, and relate to those places.

Sometimes the most important journey is simply slowing down enough to listen.

Walking Through History Beyond Belfast

The ideas explored in this research extend far beyond Belfast.

Some landscapes become repositories of collective memory. They continue to shape how people understand the past long after the events themselves have ended.

One of the places where I have felt this most strongly is Normandy.

Walking the beaches of Omaha and Utah, standing among the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, or wandering through small villages that witnessed the liberation of Europe, it becomes clear that history is not only preserved in museums. It remains embedded in the landscape itself.

Like Belfast, Normandy reminds us that places can hold multiple layers of meaning at once. They are simultaneously physical locations, historical stages, personal memorials, and emotional geographies. To walk through them is not simply to visit a destination—it is to encounter the memories that continue to shape it.

Final Reflection

Belfast is often introduced through its conflict.

Yet Hanson’s work reveals something richer.

A city shaped not only by history, but by memory.

Not only by political events, but by everyday lives.

And not only by what happened, but by how those experiences continue to be carried through streets, neighborhoods, and ordinary walks.

For travelers, it is a powerful reminder that every destination contains hidden geographies of memory waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes all we need to do is walk.

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Academic Credit

This article was inspired by:

Hanson, K. (2026). Memoryscaping: Remembering Conflict and Constructing Mnemonic Places on Guided Walks Through Belfast. Doctoral Dissertation, Temple University. The dissertation explores how guided walks through Belfast reveal the dynamic relationship between memory, place, embodiment, conflict, and urban identity in post-Troubles Northern Ireland.

Banner image created for illustrative purposes inspired by themes of memory, walking, urban landscapes, heritage, and post-conflict storytelling in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is not intended to depict a specific participant, location, event, or guided walk described in the research.