When explaining my research, it's not uncommon to have to go back an additional step and firstly define exactly for an audience what an ‘Orange Hall' is. In fact, even my phone struggles when I dictate my writing, consistently autocorrecting it to ‘orange hole’. To those familiar with the Northern Irish context, Orange Halls can be divisive architecture: contested spaces surrounded by an ever-evolving political demography. To those outside of this context, they often don't mean much. To the religious, fraternal organisation of the Orange Order, they are a vital place for meetings and social events, and a material presence in the built landscape. To me, they've long been an obsession. Having lived and worked overseas for nearly 20 years, I had often noticed them while driving around on summer breaks back in Ireland. Often fortified, with nearly every point of entry blocked or barred, they beg the question: are they meant to keep people in, or keep the world out? At times incongruous, they look like they have been dropped from space into impossibly bucolic settings. Some are proudly proclaimed and maintained, others are returning quietly to nature. Using them as a visual metaphor for my own inherited Protestant identity, I began to photograph them extensively for my research project, I Am Where I Am Not, its title inspired by the presence of absence – and absence of presence – in Foucault's conceptualisation of the mirror as both utopia and heterotopia.

Ironically, on the island province of Newfoundland in Canada – where I was fortunate enough to photograph the disproportionate number of halls from 2022–23 – they are often literally orange, with neatly painted doors and decorative trims. Now largely repurposed as apartments, shops, museums and creches after the near extinction of the local Orange Order, they offer a fascinating counterpoint to their Ulster predecessors. The sheer ubiquity of halls in Northern Ireland makes it inevitable that in an increasingly secular and pluralistic society, their future as heritage buildings will eventually become a question that must be answered, reflecting in turn the journey of my own cultural identity from one of certainty, to ambiguity, to compromise, and a comfort in hybridity. It may be that the fate of Newfoundland’s Orange Halls can offer Northern Ireland a possible model for a peaceful transition from one heritage to another.

Ulster’s Orange Halls: heritage worth surrendering? by Philip Arneill (Ulster University, UK) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 34.

Orange Halls Contested Heritage Northern Ireland Photographing Heritage Newfoundland