Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland

Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland and one of the most surprising cities in the UK. For decades its name was associated with the Troubles, the conflict that between the late 1960s and 1998 claimed more than 3,500 lives; today, almost thirty years after the Good Friday Agreement, it is a lively, welcoming city that has turned its own history into a reason to visit. The Titanic was built here, the finest linen in the world was spun here, some of the best museums and pubs in Ireland are here, and from here roads lead to the Giant's Causeway and the Antrim coast. The political murals and the "peace walls", still standing, tell of a city that lives peace as a daily achievement.

Belfast at a glance

The city has about 345,000 inhabitants, but the metropolitan area approaches 700,000, more than a third of Northern Ireland's population. The name comes from the Irish Béal Feirste, "mouth of the sandbar", the ford on the river Farset, now culverted, which flows into the Lagan. Belfast is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, based on a power-sharing system between the two communities: since February 2024 the First Minister has been Michelle O'Neill of the republican party Sinn Féin, the first nationalist to hold the post, alongside a unionist deputy First Minister from the DUP with equal powers.

Northern Irish society is still marked by the divide between the unionist community, mostly Protestant, which feels British and wants to remain in the UK, and the nationalist community, mostly Catholic, which feels Irish and aspires to unification with the Republic of Ireland. At the 2021 census, for the first time, people of Catholic religion or upbringing outnumbered Protestants, and the number of those who call themselves simply "Northern Irish" or identify with neither camp is growing.

Identities are intertwined too: in 2021 about 32% of Northern Ireland's people described themselves as British only, 29% as Irish only and 20% as Northern Irish only, while the rest gave various combinations. The traditions of the two communities show in the calendar as well: on 12 July unionists of the Orange Order march with bands and banners to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, while in August republican West Belfast hosts Féile an Phobail, one of the largest community festivals in Europe.

The history of Belfast

Linen, rope and ships

Belfast began as a small settlement around a Norman castle and grew mainly from the 17th century, with the colonisation of Ulster by Protestant English and Scottish settlers, the so-called Plantation, the root of the divisions that still mark the region. In the 18th century French Huguenots arrived and developed the linen industry. In the 19th century Belfast became the most industrialised city in Ireland and one of the richest in the British Empire: it was "Linenopolis", the world's leading linen producer, but it also had the largest ropeworks on the planet, big tobacco factories, distilleries and above all the shipyards.

The Harland & Wolff shipyard, founded in 1861, became one of the largest in the world. Here the Olympic-class liners were built for the White Star Line, including the Titanic, launched on 31 May 1911 and sunk on her maiden voyage in April 1912. Belfast people like to say, with their proverbial humour, that "she was fine when she left here". Belfast was granted city status in 1888 and celebrated its prosperity with the grand Edwardian Baroque City Hall, completed in 1906.

Partition, the Troubles and peace

In 1921 Ireland was partitioned: twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State, later the Republic, while six counties of Ulster remained in the UK as Northern Ireland, with Belfast as its capital. For decades the unionist majority governed the region, discriminating against the Catholic minority in jobs, housing and voting. In the late 1960s civil rights protests gave way to the Troubles, thirty years of violence between republican paramilitary groups such as the IRA, loyalist groups and the British security forces. Belfast was one of the epicentres: whole districts were separated by walls and gates, the centre was ringed by checkpoints and hit by hundreds of bombs. The Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998, approved by referendums in both parts of the island, ended the armed conflict and created the institutions of shared government. For more see the Irish question and the history of Northern Ireland.

After 1998 the city was reborn: the centre was reopened and renewed, the shipyard district became the Titanic Quarter, and tourists, students and investment arrived. Brexit reopened delicate questions about the border with the Republic, resolved by the Protocol and then the Windsor Framework, which keeps Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods (see Brexit and Northern Ireland).

What to see in Belfast

The centre and City Hall

The heart of the city is Donegall Square, dominated by City Hall, the Portland stone building with its great green copper dome, opened in 1906; free guided tours show the state rooms and an exhibition on the city's history, and the gardens hold a Titanic memorial. Around it lie the shopping streets and the Linen Hall Library, Belfast's oldest library, founded in 1788. Nearby, the Crown Liquor Saloon, a Victorian pub of 1885 with stained glass, tiles, carved wood and private booths called snugs, is so precious that it is owned by the National Trust.

The Titanic Quarter

On the east bank of the Lagan, where the shipyards stood, rises Titanic Belfast, the museum opened in 2012, a hundred years after the sinking, in a spectacular building as tall as the ship's hull, with angular façades that recall the bows of the liners. Its interactive galleries tell the story of industrial Belfast, the construction, the launch, life on board, the sinking and the discovery of the wreck. Nearby you can see the slipways and the Thompson Dry Dock where the Titanic received her final fitting out, the SS Nomadic, the last surviving White Star Line vessel, and Harland & Wolff's giant yellow cranes Samson and Goliath, symbols of the city. Many scenes of Game of Thrones were filmed in the nearby studios.

Murals and peace walls

To understand Belfast it is worth visiting the working-class districts of the west, where political murals tell the story of the conflict from both sides: along the Falls Road, Catholic and republican, murals recall Bobby Sands's hunger strike and the struggles of other peoples; along the Shankill Road, Protestant and loyalist, they celebrate the Crown, the Battle of the Boyne and the dead of the two world wars. Between the two districts run the peace walls, barriers up to eight metres high with gates that in some places are still closed at night, covered in graffiti and visitors' messages. The best way to visit is on a black taxi tour or on foot with local guides, often former members of the two sides, who tell the story frankly.

Museums, parks and university

• Ulster Museum: in the Botanic Gardens, art, history and natural sciences, with an Egyptian mummy, treasure from the Spanish Armada ship Girona, wrecked on the Antrim coast in 1588, and a section on the Troubles. Free entry.
• Botanic Gardens, with the Victorian Palm House, one of the earliest curvilinear cast-iron glasshouses in the world.
• Queen's University, founded in the mid-19th century, with its red-brick Tudor-style main building.
• Crumlin Road Gaol, the Victorian prison in use until 1996, where suffragettes, republicans and loyalists were held; you can see the cells, the tunnel to the courthouse and the execution cell.
• St George's Market, the covered Victorian market, open Friday to Sunday with food, crafts and live music.
• Belfast Castle and Cave Hill, the hill overlooking the city, whose profile is said to have inspired Jonathan Swift's sleeping giant in Gulliver's Travels.

Cathedral Quarter

Around St Anne's Anglican Cathedral, with its illuminated steel spire called the "Spire of Hope", the Cathedral Quarter is the district of pubs with traditional Irish music, restaurants and bars, with cobbled alleys such as Commercial Court, always crowded in the evening.

Music, pubs and food

Belfast has a very rich musical tradition: Van Morrison was born in the east of the city, and there is a lively folk and rock scene. Traditional music sessions, with fiddles, flutes and bodhrán drums, fill the pubs of the Cathedral Quarter every night. The city is also the birthplace of the writer C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, honoured by a square with statues of his characters, and of footballer George Best, after whom the city airport is named.

Northern Irish food is hearty: the Ulster fry, a breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages, black pudding and fried potato farls and soda bread, champ, mashed potato with spring onions, Irish stew, fish and seafood from Strangford Lough, and of course Guinness and Irish whiskey. Try the sweet traybakes too, such as fifteens.

Living in Belfast

Belfast has one of the lowest costs of living among Britain's capitals and big cities, with rents and house prices well below the national average. The economy is based on public services, health, education, technology and cybersecurity, financial services, film and television, tourism and advanced manufacturing such as aerospace. The universities are Queen's University Belfast, a Russell Group member, and Ulster University. Northern Ireland, however, has lower average incomes than the UK average and has suffered for years from the paralysis of its power-sharing institutions, suspended several times, most recently from 2022 to 2024. A curiosity: people born in Northern Ireland are entitled to both British and Irish, and therefore EU, citizenship. For the wider picture see living in the UK and Northern Ireland.

Practical information

• By air: Belfast has two airports, George Best Belfast City, a few minutes from the centre, with mainly domestic flights, and Belfast International, about half an hour by bus, with European flights. Many travellers arrive via Dublin Airport, linked by direct coaches in about two hours.
• By train from Dublin: the Enterprise train links Dublin Connolly with the new Belfast Grand Central station, opened in 2024, in just over two hours. Although there are no checks at the border, non-Irish European tourists entering Northern Ireland from the Republic need an ETA, from which only residents of Ireland are exempt (see travelling after Brexit).
• By ferry: crossings to Cairnryan in Scotland and to Liverpool.
• Getting around: the centre is walkable; the Glider rapid buses link east and west Belfast via the centre and the Titanic Quarter.
• Money: sterling, with banknotes also issued by Northern Irish banks; shops near the border sometimes accept euros.

Day trips

• The Giant's Causeway, a UNESCO site with its forty thousand basalt columns, about an hour and a half away, along the spectacular Causeway Coastal Route, with the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, Dunluce Castle, the Bushmills distillery and the beech avenue of the Dark Hedges.
• The Norman castle of Carrickfergus, half an hour by train.
• The Mourne Mountains, which inspired C. S. Lewis's landscapes of Narnia, and Strangford Lough.
• Derry/Londonderry, with its intact 17th-century walls, and Armagh, Ireland's ecclesiastical capital.
• Dublin, just over two hours by train.

See also Northern Ireland, the history of Northern Ireland, the Irish question, Brexit and Northern Ireland and British cities.

Belfast on the map

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