 |
This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (November 2007) |
Suffolk is a small Protestant estate situated in Belfast in the west of the city.It lies near an interface with the Catholic Lenadoon estate at the other side of the Stewartstown Road.This interface has been characterised by years of inter-community distrust, violence, and confrontation that have stigmatised the area and - until the late 1990s - have largely precluded any inter-community contact or initiatives to address both areas' levels of distress and deprivation. The impact on the Suffolk estate was such that it experienced low housing demand, out-migration, and extensive vacancy. An estate strategy of demolition and physical improvements begun by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive in 1986 was successful in stabilising the estate as a whole. However, the interface location continued to decline along the Suffolk side of the road as abandonment left derelict housing, a block of declining commercial units with empty maisonettes above, and a vacant cleared site.In 1997 the Suffolk Lenadoon Interface Group'was established to regenerate the area with a view to improving relations between the two areas.
