The DUP's HQ looks as well guarded as many military compounds, the murals dating from the Troubles still decorate most street corners and the offices of the Ulster Volunteer Force are still well maintained.
Look closely at the murals, though, and you'll see they have none of the grand swagger usually associated with Victorian public art.
Art – whether it be one of Ali's murals mixing Qur'anic calligraphy with Banksy-style graphic impact, or Aisha Zia's play No Guts, Ho Heart, No Glory, staged in a boxing gym and telling true stories of young Bradford girls' lives – was the channel for that conversation, a way of undermining polarities and finding some shared ground.
Hear the words "Ford Madox Brown" and "Manchester" in the same sentence, and you think automatically of the Town Hall murals, that 12-part picture book of the city's history which Brown was commissioned to paint on the interior walls of Alfred Waterhouse's neo-gothic civic palace in 1878.
Despite chunterings by the locals at the potential blighting of their favourite hangout, the duo have spent a fortune to keep it looking much as it did: the murals, the red booths, the jukebox, all still here.
You pass a great hall with a hammer-beam roof and Ford Madox Brown murals.
While reviewing the city's history to find subjects for his murals, he found an abundance of moments that chimed with his own subtle understanding of the human condition.
Later, while living in Manchester and working on the Town Hall murals, he painted Madeline Scott, daughter of CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, sitting proudly astride her tricycle – the first time that such a contraption had ever been wheeled into a portrait painting.
She has described her fiction as "painting wall-size murals with a brush the size of an eyelash", and The Goldfinch combines narrative grandeur with dazzling detail.
There's an area for a bonfire and you can buy alcohol or bring your own; marvel at the fantastic murals, which cover four of the hostal's walls.
Her seemingly artless daubs tend to leak out on to the walls like furtive murals and – accompanied by photographic, sculptural and written fragments – leave a treasure trail of mysterious clues, adding up to some highly cultured misbehaviour.
