The fifth episode of Sixties NI takes us back to the housing conditions of the era while also examining transport old and new.
The episode starts in the Carrick Hill area of Belfast. The area had been deemed as slum dwelling and was earmarked for demolition. However, as the cameras found, while the Victorian housing was often in no fit state for habitation, the sense of community felt by the residents meant that many were reluctant to leave behind the tightly knit streets they had grown up in.
Conditions were even worse at the Springhill Camp in Derry/Londonderry. Here, people were living in crumbling corrugated iron huts which had housed US servicemen during the war. Families had moved in, supposedly on a temporary basis, but decades later some of the people who had arrived as children now had families of their own and were still there.
Help was on the way, however, as city planners began developing modern housing estates and high rise living in flats. Some of these areas were to suffer their own problems in the decades ahead, but at this time they promised residents all the mod cons and a much better standard of housing than they had been used to.
Change was also coming to the world of transport. New roads were laid down all over Northern Ireland as the government invested in the future of the motor car. The M1 was opened to join Belfast to the West of the country and motorists are seen testing it on its opening day.
But the old modes of transport still hung on – just. The railways had seen savage cuts in the 1950s and now saw further cutbacks in the 1960s. We see footage of the last days of the Strabane to Donegal railway and enjoy a journey along the Antrim to Lisburn line, now also closed, passing through stations like Ballinderry and Aldergrove.
One haunting section of UTV film from 1964 recreates a journey along the old Co Down railway, which had closed in 1950. By this stage the tracks were removed and most of the stations demolished. But some ghosts of the past still lingered, such as the central supports of the railway arches at the Holywood Arches in east Belfast and all of Comber station, which sat overlooking the new road which had replaced the railway line.
Shots of a lonely linesman walking the line near Lurgan is intercut with images of the sad decline of the railways in Northern Ireland as stations were closed and broken up, trains abandoned and sold for scrap. But we also meet with some railway preservation enthusiasts, and the passion of these people would keep many trains functioning for future generations to enjoy.
Finally, we visit the Ballymacarratt area of Belfast. Its station is also pulled down and much of the housing in the area would soon follow suit. However, one grand old lady, born in 1880, is interviewed by UTV about the changes she has seen, and her optimistic view of the world is truly infectious.