Elbows, bends and lyrical space

Ridgeway Street sounds like something out of an Ealing comedy - all charm, Englishness and deft touch. This Belfast street is a continuing surprise - a sudden fall from Stranmillis Road in a city that one images as a flat apron laid out under Black Mountain and Divis; houses that have enough in common to establish a loose coherence, but with odd dormers and narrow stepping plots that give a whimsical twist; a line of folded roof planes dropping precariously towards the Lagan, their angles spiking the skyline. The Lyric accounts for the last set of these spiky roofs at the end of the terrace at the bottom of Ridgeway Street.