So that's how the world works: last Friday I was apoplectic about the high-rise flats towering over the beautiful St Joseph's Church and this Friday I'm looking at a story in the North Belfast News castigating the development.
Though Mark Hackett of the Forum for an Alternative Belfast (i.e. one which people want to live in and which cherishes its people and neighbourhoods) isn't as scathing about the height of the empty apartment block, he thinks it's disgraceful that it has no ground floor activity.
Where there should be shops or a creche or a restaurant or an office even, there is car parking. Without that, there's no connection with the community, he says.
You can read his thoughts on this pdf. But he says: "These large boxes are being marketed as the European model but they lack the sophistication that those models have. I hear a lot of people in Belfast talking about 'tall buildings are good' and 'they create an image of the city that's vibrant', but not if it's a hollow vision because the ground floor activities and connectedness of the streets makes a city really vibrant and we don't have that."
Mark tells me he and his co-conspirators for a better Belfast, Declan Hill and Ciarán Mackel, are known as the three grumps but in this picture, he looks quite angry. Though unfortunately, the photo from this angle doesn't show St Joseph's Church.
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