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Belfast Castle
Built in 1870 for the third Marquess of Donegall, in the Scottish Baronial style made fashionable by Queen Victoria's then recently built Balmoral, the multiturreted pomp of Belfast Castle commands the southeastern slopes of Cave Hill. It was presented to the City of Belfast in 1934.
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Clarendon Dock
North of the Harbour Commissioner's Office is the restored Clarendon Dock. Leading off it are the dry docks where Belfast's ship-building industry was born - No 1 Dry Dock (1796-1800) is Ireland's oldest, and remained in use until the 1960s; No 2 (1826) is still used occasionally. Between the two sits the pretty little Clarendon Building, now home to the offices of the Laganside Corporation.
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Custom House
South along the river is the elegant Custom House, built by Lanyon in Italianate style between 1854 and 1857; the writer Anthony Trollope once worked in the post office here. On the waterfront side the pediment carries sculpted portrayals of Britannia, Neptune and Mercury. The Custom House steps were once Belfast's equivalent of London's Speakers' Corner, a tradition memorialised in a bronze statue preaching to an invisible crowd.
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Lagan Weir
Across the street from the Custom House is Bigfish (1999), the most prominent of the many modern artworks that grace the riverbank between Clarendon Dock and Ormeau Bridge. The giant ceramic salmon - a symbol of the regeneration of the River Lagan - is covered with tiles depicting the history of Belfast. It sits beside Lagan Weir, the first stage of the Laganside Project, completed in 1994.
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Malone House
This beautiful 1820s mansion has exhibitions of paintings in its gallery and a reputable restaurant. Its large gardens have many rhododendrons and azaleas, with paths leading down to the Lagan Towpath and the City of Belfast International Rose Garden, which usually nurtures more than 20,000 blooms.
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Milltown Cemetery
The 1981 hunger strikers are buried at Milltown Cemetery. You'll see lots of green Hs attached to lamp posts (in memory of the H-blocks at the Maze prison where the hunger strikers were incarcerated); at Hugo St, opposite the City Cemetery, there's a large mural entitled 'St James's Support the Hunger Strikers'.
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Northern Bank Building
Opposite the elegant Commercial Building is the Northern Bank Building, the oldest public building in the city. It started life as the single-storey Exchange in 1769, became the Assembly Rooms with the addition of an upper storey in 1777, and was remodelled in Italianate style in 1845 by Sir Charles Lanyon, Belfast's pre-eminent Victorian architect, to become a bank.
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Obel
The 29-storey Obel, Belfast's tallest building, soars above the waterfront at Donegall Quay. It's the latest stage in the ambitious Laganside Project to redevelop and regenerate the centre of Belfast. All 182 apartments in the building were sold in advance, within 48 hours of being released; it's due for completion some time in 2008.
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Parliament House
The dazzling white neoclassical façade of Parliament House at Stormont is one of Belfast's most iconic buildings; in the North, 'Stormont' carries the same connotation as 'Westminster' does in Britain and 'Washington' in the USA - the seat of power. For 40 years, from its completion in 1932 until the introduction of direct rule in 1972, it was the seat of the parliament of Northern Ireland.
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Peace Line
There are steel gates that mark the beginning of the so-called Peace Line, the 6m-high wall of corrugated steel, concrete and chain link that has divided the Protestant and Catholic communities of West Belfast for almost 40 years. Begun in 1970 as a 'temporary measure', it has now outlasted the Berlin Wall, and zigzags for some 4km from the Westlink to the lower slopes of Black Mountain. These days the gates in the wall remain open during the day, but most are still closed from to .
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Royal Courts of Justice
Across Oxford St lie the 1933 neoclassical Royal Courts of Justice, bombed by the IRA in 1990 but now emerging from behind the massive security screens that once concealed them.
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Royal Victoria Hospital
The Royal Victoria Hospital claims to be the world's first air-conditioned building. The artwork railings date from 1906. Known locally as the RVH, it played an important role in creating the first ever portable defibrillator and, in the 1970s and '80s, developed a well-earned reputation for expertise in the treatment of gunshot wounds.
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Stormont Castle
Near Parliament House, 19th-century Stormont Castle is, like Hillsborough in County Down, an official residence of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
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Tropical Ravine
Near Charles Lanyon's beautiful Palm House is the unique Tropical Ravine, a huge red-brick greenhouse designed by the Botanic Gardens' curator Charles McKimm and completed in 1889. Inside, a raised walkway overlooks a jungle of tropical ferns, orchids, lilies and banana plants growing in a sunken glen.
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Union Theological College
Opposite the eastern end of the University Square is the grand, neo-Renaissance Union Theological College (1853), originally the Presbyterian College and yet another Lanyon design. It housed the Northern Ireland Parliament from the partition of Ireland until 1932, when the Parliament Buildings at Stormont were opened.
Showing 1-15 of 15 results
