PHOTOGRAPHED IN MAY 2012

BY LOUISE WALSH

The "Shady Ladies" Shunted Sideways

Just around the corner from the Maldron, standing proudly on the main thoroughfare of Great Victoria Street outside the Europa Hotel, are two formidable bronze women.

This is the "Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker" by artist Louise Walsh. It is one of Belfast’s most recognisable artworks, a powerful tribute to low-paid female labour, domestic drudgery, and the resilience of working-class women.

But they aren't supposed to be there.

In the late 1980s, the statue was commissioned specifically for Amelia Street—the narrow street running down the side of the Crown Bar towards the current Maldron hotel. The brief required the art to reflect the history of the immediate area. The artist, Louise Walsh, did her research and discovered Amelia Street’s history as a notorious "red-light" district.

She designed her "working women" to encompass all forms of female labour, including sex work, incorporating household items like colanders and graters into the bronze fabric of their being. When the design was revealed, Belfast City Council and local developers were horrified. They deemed the reference to the area’s gritty reality "immoral" and refused to install it.

They wanted regeneration art that sanitised history, not art that highlighted it.

The project was dropped until a private developer, amused by the controversy of the so-called "shady ladies," bought the piece and installed it on their land around the corner in 1992. Today, tourists snap photos of it, unaware that it was an architectural refugee banned from its original home just a few yards away.