{"id":307,"date":"2018-09-28T10:04:21","date_gmt":"2018-09-28T09:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/?page_id=307"},"modified":"2018-09-28T10:15:29","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T09:15:29","slug":"barbara-and-john-paul-whearty","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/we-are-belfast\/barbara-and-john-paul-whearty\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara and John-Paul Whearty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Barbara
\nPhoto Credit: Brendan Gallagher themarketingphotographer.co.uk<\/a><\/div>\n

Barbara and John-Paul Whearty are originally one-half Belfast and one-half Dublin. Barbara is \u201cborn and bred\u201d Belfast with a few years of roaming to foreign lands; John-Paul moved to Belfast in 2010 on the offer of a job in film production. For Barbara, it was a case of not feeling at home anywhere else. For John-Paul: \u201cI\u2019m a blow-in. I ended up here by accident. I was coming here to get away from life and find a new adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

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They recently opened Cafe Cuan<\/a> as the first phase of redeveloping a historic building. They aim to challenge a few Belfast shibboleths along the way. Part of that is about demonstrating that change comes from doing, not just from complaining. And another is saying that the city needs to focus on quality: \u201cif you\u2019re going to strive to be the best at anything, then you have to have the best of everything. That doesn\u2019t mean expensive. It means thinking differently about your solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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What is the challenge you\u2019re working to address in Belfast?<\/strong>
\nA couple, really. One is that there are two Belfasts: the establishment narrative, and the real story of a gritty city. Too many people have become disconnected from Belfast\u2019s soul, especially the powers that be. Belfast is becoming like so many other cities. We\u2019ve got economic regeneration, but it\u2019s homogenised regeneration. Another is that there\u2019s a wild lot of complacency in Belfast. It\u2019s not enough to say, \u2018oh, that\u2019s the way we always do it\u2019. We want our colleagues to feel valued, to live and not just subsist, but there\u2019s a cultural acceptance of doing the bare minimum. We\u2019d rather go out of business by paying someone a wage that they can live on for three years than make money from exploiting somebody.<\/p>\n

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And people think it\u2019s easier to knock an old building down than nurture it back to life. The reality is, our building is over 100 years old and is more solid than anything being built now. It sits on the fringe of an \u2018urban village\u2019 zone. In Belfast that means a preference to knock down what\u2019s there and replace it with something shiny. But that\u2019s not how you build a village, a community. You build a village by having shopkeepers and banks and a post office and that\u2019s what we want to try and do here. The vision for using and reusing what we\u2019ve got and for putting people at the heart of the city just doesn\u2019t exist in places where it should. We hand design over to technical professionals, but a part of the process of creating places is people!<\/p>\n

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How are you thinking and doing differently?<\/strong>
\nWe want to show that there\u2019s a way to commercially redevelop older buildings, with a community focus and quality jobs: it\u2019s about the value added to the local community and to the city. We\u2019re trying to build a place that we enjoy and that our neighbours enjoy. Thousands of people pass here every day, but nobody knew what to do with these buildings. They\u2019re just as important as any of the marquee historic buildings in Belfast; they tell a story, they\u2019re part of a neighbourhood. What we\u2019re doing speaks to the people who originally built Belfast. They were all business owners, they were independent, they were creative people. They had a vision for the city and got together and put their resources together to make that happen.<\/p>\n

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It just screamed out to us as a place for people to come into. Belfast needs places for people to come in and just talk to each other. We complain a lot and we\u2019ve been criticised for that in the past, but all the time we were looking for a building where we could invite people in and put the kettle on, \u2018cos that\u2019s our culture, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

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This building is our community: we live just up the road. We\u2019re both great believers in timing and this opportunity just came along at the right time. We want to help rebuild a village in this area, and show people that it can be done. We haven\u2019t spent a huge amount of money; it\u2019s everything we have and people tell us that we\u2019re mad, but we believe in it, and you can be savvy about it. We\u2019re starting with the coffee shop and then shortly the kitchen. Two floors above will be a creative co-working space, with a special rate for early-adopter creatives. It\u2019s about trying to encourage collaboration and a new way of working in the city, shaped around a strong digital infrastructure. The top floor used to be a dance hall, The Cromac, it still has a sprung floor; ultimately we\u2019re working for it to be a postproduction suite for TV and film. Altogether, it\u2019s about making the building sustainable and providing benefit to the local area.<\/p>\n

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What will make a successful Belfast for you?<\/strong>
\nIt will be a city that\u2019s fair. If we don\u2019t create and shape a society that\u2019s fair, then we\u2019re going to repeat the problems of the past. We\u2019re promoting big multi-national companies but not promoting the small-scale enterprising businesses in the same way. But, we need to allow people to develop their own ideas in places where they feel valued. If you create a fair society, people want to contribute. We need to encourage other people to get involved, to do whatever they can do to make a difference. We have to think in terms of villages, but real villages, not institutionalised ones. And every village has a soul. Belfast is a city of villages, so let\u2019s use those souls.<\/p>\n

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In old buildings, just like in cities, you have to work with what you find. It might be an inconvenience, but it\u2019s where the value is. Belfast\u2019s soul is the resilience of its people. We sometimes forget about our resilience, but it\u2019s where our dark humour comes from, and if anything defines Belfast, it\u2019s the dark humour of its people: you come to Belfast and the first person you meet slags you, and that\u2019s it, you\u2019re in. In an attempt to become \u2018hip and cool\u2019, we\u2019re forgetting that we are a place with its own flavour. For example, the independent shops like Fresh Garbage, Good Vibrations, American Madness, all represented underground aspects of the social life of the city. There was lots of hidden creativity in the city and we forget about that in an attempt to \u2018catch-up\u2019 with other places and to patch over what was an incredibly difficult time in our history. A successful Belfast will be one that grabs that authentic identity and declares \u2018This is who we are!\u2019<\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: Brendan Gallagher themarketingphotographer.co.uk Barbara and John-Paul Whearty are originally one-half Belfast and one-half Dublin. Barbara is \u201cborn and bred\u201d Belfast with a few years of roaming to foreign lands; John-Paul moved to Belfast in 2010 on the offer of a job in film…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":309,"parent":214,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/307\/revisions\/311"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/214"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.successfulbelfast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}