At home in Heaney country

Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a new centre designed with the help of the poet’s family, is full of his words and spirit

My strong guess is that not even the proudest local would describe the somewhat awkwardly named Seamus Heaney HomePlace, a gleaming new arts centre in the village of Bellaghy, County Derry, as beautiful, even if it is far, far lovelier than what came before (on this site there used to stand a heavily fortified RUC barracks). Its bland, vaguely Scandinavian structure, encircled by inky asphalt, looks for all the world like a new branch of Waitrose, while its interiors, wipe-clean spaces that seem to me to allow far too little of the outside in, are nothing if not functional.

But then, it’s possible that beauty is not the point in this case. The existence of such a place at all, in a world in which arts budgets everywhere are being so ruthlessly cut, is nothing short of a miracle, Mid Ulster district council having funded almost the entirety of its £4.25m building costs (it also plans to meet the £500,000 it will take to run the place each year). “What are they on, there?” I kept thinking as I looked around. I’ve been known to make some pretty grandiose claims for poetry myself down the years, but even I’m surprised it can induce parsimonious local government officers to spend like this.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by the sight of the young Seamus’s leather satchel