Belfast: city of riveters, inventors, linen mill girls, boxers, pamphleteers, revolutionaries, Lambeg drummers, Irish bagpipers, mission hall preachers, and mustachioed burghers with pocket watches. Some of these can still be seen, here and there, usually in ghostly form. Now you are more likely to find cocktail creators, urban farmers, NGO officials, tech specialists, muralists, political tour guides, ravers, and Irish-language teachers.
The city takes its name from the Irish Béal, or mouth, and Feirste, referring to the confluence of the rivers Farset and Lagan, which flow into Belfast Lough and out into the Irish Sea. It’s flat like a coin. Intensely green hills rise around it. One of them, Cavehill, is said to have appeared as a recumbent giant to Jonathan Swift.
Belfast boomed spectacularly in the 19th century. Great fortunes were made from linen spinning, distilling, printing, rope making, and shipbuilding. Its face was inclined to be dour and imposing, a Victorian riposte to rose-bricked, frivolous, Georgian Dublin. Tight neighborhoods of half doors, street songs, and factory horns grew roots around mills and shipyards: Sailortown, Tiger’s Bay, Sandy Row, The Hammer, the Pound Loney, the Kashmir. Consonant-rich words such as gurn, glyp, stumer, and skite were coined. It might be like any number of British industrial cities, except that it is on a different island and experienced 30 years of violent conflict.
I first saw it in 1982. It was a monochrome scene. The center was caged and checkpointed. Shops were bombsites, and pods of soldiers moved along the Falls Road with rifles. Watchtowers loomed. Saracens sped. Helicopters panted above. The Europa had the distinction of being the most bombed hotel in Europe. Tourism was minimal to nonexistent. A taxi driver in a battered Ford Cortina hopefully handed me his card: “Tours – Scenic and Political.”
Then, in 1998, came the Good Friday Agreement. The British Army stepped back and eventually left. Loyalists and the IRA ceased their campaigns. Union Jacks and Irish tricolors were waved. Van Morrison sang, “My mama told me there’ll be days like this.” The city seemed to exhale collectively, to begin to talk more openly, to be curious about those it had shunned, like a family—suddenly relieved of a rancorous secret.
I’ve been to Belfast many times, but always fleetingly. I came back for the Agreement’s 25th anniversary, over bright early April days, in the role of a tourist. It surprised me. Many presuppositions were upended. I hadn’t expected the abundance of music, the sumptuousness and originality of the hotels, the cross-community meetings of minds. I hadn’t known about the narrow laneways of the Cathedral Quarter, with their allusive, witty, and movingly beautiful murals; tanneries and printing works; little bars and world-class restaurants smartly fashioned from whiskey storerooms. It feels like London’s Shoreditch, Edinburgh's West End, or Dublin’s Temple Bar before the invasions. Block by block, the city is reclaiming itself from dereliction.
Much of this is being done by Irish entrepreneurs—variations of their Victorian forebears but without the pocket watches. Bill Wolsey, owner of The Merchant Hotel, Belfast’s most splendid stay, also has four engaging pubs and a hip hotel, Bullitt, with an elevator which announces its floors not with a robotic GPS voice but with the Belfastian, “This is the second floor, so it is.” Willie Jack has the legendary Duke of York, along with three other bars in the vicinity and a private whiskey museum. He prefers the old name of Half Bap to the Cathedral Quarter, calls himself a street cleaner and barman, and wants to cover the walls of the city with art.
Anthony Kieran, who was nearly blown to pieces in South Armagh, came back from the US when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, sold used cars, and, with the money he made, turned a derelict terrace into the exquisite apartment hotel The Regency. Melanie Harrison likewise returned from elsewhere to open The Harrison Chambers of Distinction, a cornucopia of irreverent art, literature, and communal chat.
This is an entrepreneurialism untainted by the boardroom or design studio. It is local, individualistic, committed, and often, witty. From Féile an Phobail (the West Belfast Festival) in the Falls to Banana Block, with its raves and mushroom-growing, in the east, there’s the sense of a city discovering itself in a new reality. The conflict was a strain and left grief, but it is also stitched into this awakening. You can have a very good and very unusual time here. A taxi driver enthused to me about what a great place it is to raise children.
Where to stay
The Merchant Hotel, which was restored from an Ulster Bank building, stands out for its opulence and attention to detail. Comprising art deco and Victorian wings, it’s a world in itself, with three restaurants, a cocktail bar, a hot tub on the roof, and Bert’s Jazz Bar. At The Regency House, Anthony Kieran and his wife, Andrea, have created five beautiful residences full of surprising personal touches (a vinyl collection, musical instruments, etc.), with a concierge service. Eight new suites, a wellness center, and a members’ club are due to open later this fall.
The luxurious and serene Culloden Estate and Spa sits in 12 acres surrounding a converted bishop’s palace on the shores of Belfast Lough. The Harrison Chambers of Distinction, an act of flamboyant self-expression by owner Melanie Harrison, is possibly the most entertaining hotel I’ve stayed in. Each room is different and named after an Irish writer, artist, or musician. The talk flows, and Harrison’s presence is inimitable.
Where to eat
Belfast once featured the chip butty and the Ulster fry, which included sausages known locally as “mystery bags”. Now it has a San Sebastian-like density of Michelin-starred restaurants. One is the very fine and popular Ox, set on the River Lagan and created by Breton restaurateur Alain Kerloc’h and Irish chef Stephen Toman. In the Cathedral Quarter is Niall McKenna’s Waterman House, which has its own cooking school, and the much-lauded Muddlers Club, established by Gareth McCaughey from County Tyrone and named after a secret society within the 18th-century United Irishmen movement. Michael Deane, who earned his first Michelin star in 1997 and has several restaurants, including Deanes Love Fish and Deanes Meat Locker, is perhaps the dominating force in Belfast fine dining.
I’ve always had a great time at Mourne Seafood Bar, and—though I could only stop for oysters with shallot and apple dressing at Danny Millar’s Stock Kitchen and Bar—several people I spoke with nominated it as their favorite spot. The set menus at Blank, near Queen’s University, are a rich journey of Northern Irish provenance, Tyrone oxtail and all. Political tourists might find it interesting to have lunch at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, an Irish-language gallery, bookshop, and performance venue in a decommissioned Protestant church in the Falls Road, or the Felons Club, set up by Republican ex-prisoners in an old Methodist meeting house.
Where to drink
As well as The Duke of York, Willie Jack owns The Harp Bar and The Dark Horse nearby. Don’t miss the murals in the latter’s courtyard: no Irish personage is spared the satirical lash. Maddens is the premier pub for traditional Irish music; the Sunflower has nightly live bands and retains its redundant security cage around the front door as an example of postmodern political wit. Kelly’s Cellars, dating from 1720, is always vibrant. I find The Spaniard, just across the road from The Merchant Hotel, an intimate and intriguing pub; The Crown Liquor Saloon, with its snugs and mosaics, is globally famous; and Bullhouse East and Boundary Brewing are among the best of the city’s many microbreweries.
What to do
The most surprising and memorable thing I did on my last trip to Belfast, along with seeing Van Morrison at the Ulster Hall, was to enter the Irish Sea near dawn at Helen’s Bay under the tutelage of Ciaran May from Natural Resilience—an utterly invigorating small parable of moving through things one normally resists. The Maritime Mile offers a number of nautical and shipbuilding-related experiences, the main one being Titanic Belfast, a museum devoted to the fated liner, with a tear-jerking ending involving a single glass-encased violin. Down at the end, in an old pumphouse, is Titanic Distillers, the creation of a former bus driver from Short Strand named Peter Lavery, who won the lottery, and, instead of blowing it in Las Vegas, did something traditional and enhancing for his city. You can have lunch at the old shipyard Drawing Office in what is now the Titanic Hotel.
Concierge William McIlroy gives excellent tours. The political tourism tentatively offered to me by that taxi driver decades ago is now a thriving industry, often operated by ex-prisoners. Visitors see not only the recent history of political struggle in the last war zone of Western Europe, but a still-evolving story. Visit West Belfast offers great walking, bus, and taxi tours, and I had two outstanding Blue Badge guides in Touring Around Belfast’s Billy Scott and Dee Morgan of DeeTours Ireland—both entertaining storytellers. They gave rich context to the Crumlin Road Gaol museum and the peace walls; the Milltown cemetery and hunger strikers’ graves; the Irish Republican History Museum in Conway Mill; and the murals in the Shankill and Falls roads.
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