🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Wales and Northern Ireland
Belfast is a city that in a few years went from being a byword for conflict to becoming one of the most interesting and fastest-rising destinations in the British Isles. Capital of Northern Ireland, it was an industrial power: the largest linen producer in the world and the largest shipbuilder on the planet, birthplace of the RMS Titanic, launched here in 1912. That past is told today at Titanic Belfast, one of the most spectacular museums in Europe, built right where the Harland & Wolff shipyards stood.
But Belfast is also a city carrying a hard, complex recent history: the Troubles, the conflict that between the late 1960s and 1998 set the unionist community (mostly Protestant, in favour of staying in the United Kingdom) against the nationalist one (mostly Catholic, in favour of a united Ireland), and which left some 3,600 dead. Touring the political murals of the Falls Road and the Shankill Road and the 'peace walls' that still separate neighbourhoods, with a local guide in a black taxi, is one of the most honest and moving experiences the city offers, and a lesson in contemporary history.
Beyond that, Belfast surprises you with its warmth, its nightlife and its food. The Cathedral Quarter, with its pubs, street art murals and live music, is the heart of the scene; the Edwardian City Hall presides over the centre; St George's Market fills up at weekends; and a little over an hour away is one of the most astonishing landscapes in the world: the Giant's Causeway. This guide covers the essentials of Belfast with a practical, warm eye and respect for its history.
Belfast grew out of a settlement beside a ford on the River Lagan, but its real modern history starts in the seventeenth century with the Plantation of Ulster, the colonisation of the area by English and Scottish Protestant settlers. In the eighteenth century it prospered as a merchant and linen city, and in the nineteenth it became an industrial power: the largest linen producer in the world and home to Harland & Wolff, the largest shipyard on the planet, where the Titanic was built and launched in 1912. The partition of Ireland in 1921 made it the capital of Northern Ireland, which stayed inside the United Kingdom while the south became independent. Between the late 1960s and 1998, the city was a central theatre of the Troubles, the conflict between the unionist and nationalist communities, which ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Since then, Belfast has been going through a remarkable revival, although the divisions have not entirely disappeared. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Two Celtic nations with intense histories: Wales, land of the last independent princes, of coal and of a language on the way back; and Northern Ireland, marked by the Plantation of Ulster, the partition of 1921, the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Read the history of Wales and Northern Ireland →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name Belfast comes from the Irish Béal Feirste, usually translated as 'the mouth of the sandbank', in reference to a ford that allowed people to cross the River Farset (today almost entirely culverted) near where it meets the Lagan, at the head of Belfast Lough. In the Middle Ages there was a castle and a small settlement here, but Belfast was no more than a minor place in a territory, Ulster, which was the last region of Ireland to resist English conquest.
That changed at the beginning of the seventeenth century with a decisive episode: the Plantation of Ulster. After the defeat of the Gaelic lords and the 'flight of the earls' (1607), the English Crown organised the systematic colonisation of the north of Ireland with Protestant settlers from England and, above all, from Scotland. Belfast received a charter in 1613 and grew as a settlement of those new inhabitants. That sowing of a Protestant population, British in culture, on a land with a Catholic and Gaelic majority laid the roots of the communal fracture that would mark the history of Northern Ireland in the centuries to come. Through the seventeenth century, wars and rebellions (such as that of 1641) devastated the region and hardened that division.
During the eighteenth century, Belfast prospered as a merchant city, exporting through its port the products of the industry that would make it famous: linen. The region became the great centre of linen cloth production, first by hand and then, with the Industrial Revolution, in enormous steam-powered mills. In the nineteenth century, Belfast was the largest linen producer in the world, to the point of earning the nickname 'Linenopolis' (the linen city).
The spinning mills and weaving sheds gave work to tens of thousands of people, many of them women and girls, in often extremely hard conditions and on low wages. The city grew at a dizzying rate, drawing workers from the countryside, both Protestant and Catholic, who settled in working-class districts separated by community, a pattern of segregation that has largely lasted to this day. Belfast was granted city status in 1888, and its new power and wealth took shape in monumental buildings such as the imposing City Hall, completed in 1906. But Belfast's fortune did not stop at linen: beside the port another, even more spectacular industry was growing.
On the banks of the Lagan, on land reclaimed from the water known as Queen's Island, the shipyard was born that would turn Belfast into the shipbuilding capital of the world. In 1861 the firm of Harland & Wolff was formed, founded by Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff, and over the following decades it became the largest shipyard on the planet. By around 1900 it employed some 9,000 people, and in the early twentieth century it was, quite simply, number one in the world.
Some of the most famous ocean liners in history were built there for the White Star Line, among them the three giants of the Olympic class. The second of these was the RMS Titanic, launched in Belfast in 1912, then the largest ship in the world. It was the city's pride. But on its maiden voyage, on the night of 14 to 15 April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank, taking the lives of some 1,500 of the more than 2,200 people on board. The tragedy went around the world and was etched for ever into Belfast's identity.
For a long time the city lived with that story somewhat awkwardly; today, by contrast, it claims it as a central part of its heritage. In 2012, on the centenary of the sinking, Titanic Belfast opened, a spectacular museum built right on the old shipyards, beside the slipways where the ship was built. The two great yellow Harland & Wolff cranes, nicknamed Samson and Goliath, still dominate the city skyline as a symbol of that industrial past.
The twentieth century brought Belfast the political conflict that would define its fate. The whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, but from the end of the nineteenth century the movement for self-government (Home Rule) and, later, for independence was growing. That movement clashed with the will of the Protestant and unionist majority in the northeast of the island — concentrated around Belfast — who wanted to remain British and firmly opposed being absorbed into a Catholic, self-governing Ireland.
After the First World War, the Irish War of Independence and mounting tensions, the United Kingdom chose to divide the island. The partition of Ireland took shape with the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which in 1921 created two self-governing entities: Northern Ireland, made up of six Ulster counties with a Protestant-unionist majority and with Belfast as its capital, which remained in the United Kingdom; and the south, which after the Anglo-Irish Treaty would become the Irish Free State and, later, the independent Republic of Ireland.
The border left inside Northern Ireland a substantial Catholic and nationalist minority — around a third of the population — governed by a unionist regime that, for decades, discriminated against it in access to housing, employment and the vote in local elections. Partition itself was accompanied by outbreaks of sectarian violence in Belfast in the early 1920s. That unresolved structural inequality would be the fuse of the conflict that exploded half a century later.
At the end of the 1960s, the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland started a civil rights movement, inspired by the American one, to demand an end to discrimination. The marches were put down, and from 1969 violence broke out in a spiral that would last almost thirty years: the conflict known, with typical British understatement, as 'the Troubles'. In essence, it pitted two communities against each other: unionists or loyalists (mostly Protestant), who wanted to keep Northern Ireland inside the United Kingdom, and nationalists or republicans (mostly Catholic), who aspired to a united Ireland.
Paramilitary groups on both sides took part in the conflict — the Provisional IRA on the republican side; the UVF and the UDA on the loyalist side — along with the British security forces. Belfast was one of the central theatres, with bombings, shootings, sectarian murders and whole districts separated by barricades. The so-called 'peace walls' were put up to separate communities such as those of the Falls Road (Catholic) and the Shankill Road (Protestant), and many of them are still standing. Among the gravest episodes is Bloody Sunday, on 30 January 1972, when British soldiers opened fire on a peaceful civil rights demonstration in Derry/Londonderry and killed thirteen unarmed people (a fourteenth died later). In 1981, the hunger strike by republican prisoners, in which the MP Bobby Sands died, marked another turning point.
The conflict left some 3,600 dead and tens of thousands injured, victims from all communities and also among the security forces and the civilian population. There was no single side responsible for all the suffering: atrocities were committed by all sides, and the wounds are still open in many families. It is a history that Belfast tells today seriously and without triumphalism, aware that the memory of the conflict remains deeply sensitive.
After years of negotiations, ceasefires and diplomatic effort, the conflict found a political way out. On 10 April 1998, Good Friday, the Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, was signed in Belfast. It was a historic achievement, endorsed by referendum with large majorities on both sides of the border. The agreement set up a devolved 'power-sharing' government between unionists and nationalists, recognised the principle of consent (that the status of Northern Ireland can only change by the will of the majority of its population), drove police reform, the disarmament of the paramilitary groups and the release of prisoners, and created institutions of cooperation between the north and the south of the island.
The agreement did not erase the divisions, but it put an end to large-scale violence and opened a period of relative peace and enormous transformation for Belfast. The city reinvented itself: the centre and the waterfront were rebuilt, tourism flourished, Titanic Belfast went up and districts such as the Cathedral Quarter filled with life. Belfast went from being a byword for conflict to becoming a fashionable destination, also famous for having been one of the filming locations for the series Game of Thrones.
Challenges remain. Many neighbourhoods are still segregated, the peace walls have not gone away, power-sharing politics has been through crises and paralysis, and Brexit — the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union — revived old tensions over the status of the border with the Republic of Ireland, which is still in the EU, and over the trade arrangements that affect Northern Ireland. But the Belfast of today, welcoming, creative and proud of its history (the good and the difficult), is proof of how far it has come.