Architectural, Cultural sights in Northern Ireland
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A
Clifton House
A 10-minute walk north-west from St Anne's Cathedral along Donegall and Clifton Sts leads to Clifton House, built in 1774 by Robert Joy (Henry Joy McCracken’s uncle) as a poorhouse. The finest surviving Georgian building in Belfast, it now houses a nursing home.
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B
Ulster Bank Building
The most flamboyant legacy of Belfast's Victorian era is the grandiose 1860 Ulster Bank Building, now home to the Merchant Hotel, this Italianate extravaganza has a portico of soaring columns and sculpted figures depicting Britannia, Justice and Commerce, and iron railings decorated with the Red Hand of Ulster and Irish wolfhounds.
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C
Guildhall
Standing just outside the city walls opposite the Tower Museum, the neo-Gothic Guildhall was originally built in 1890, then rebuilt after a fire in 1908. As the seat of the old Londonderry Corporation, which institutionalised the policy of discriminating against Catholics over housing and jobs, it incurred the wrath of nationalists and was bombed twice by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1972.
From 2000 to 2005 it was the seat of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk), headed by Lord Saville, which sat from March 2000 till December 2004. The inquiry heard from 900 witnesses, received 2500 witness statements, and allegedly cost the British taxpayer…
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