‘Linenopolis’ is crammed with treasures, from the UK’s loveliest pub to memorials to the 1912 tragedy
From the moment you breathe in the air of Belfast, your senses are stoked up with the rich spirit of the place; with the uncommon charm and cheerfulness of the people – ever heartening and helpful – along with the beauty of so many of its buildings. As a bumper bonus, it has the most beautiful public house in the United Kingdom.
Once the linen capital of the world, the city went on to harbour a great shipyard, as well as the largest rope works and tobacco factory in the world.
My heart quickens with the memory of it all – with the buildings from the 1700s onwards, all proclaiming the prosperity of ‘Linenopolis’, while Victorian and Edwardian palaces of commerce still holler triumphantly at one another in the very centre of the city, across Donegal Square and the City Hall, the domed symbol of civic pride.
The 1st Marquess of Donegal was largely responsible for the laying-out of the elegant architectural foundations of 18th-century Belfast. He built many of the first public buildings, as well as the churches. He gave the land for the Poor House of 1774, as well as the White Linen Hall of 1783.
The Poor House was for ‘the employment of idle beggars … and the reception of old and diseased poor’.
Children were later admitted and it was thanks to their being ‘employed’ with spinning wheels that Belfast’s first cotton mill came on the scene. With its ever-growing success came the full-scale production of cotton and linen – and with that the blooming and booming of Belfast.
The White Linen Hall – where linen was bought and sold – was the symbolic centre of this success. It was built where the City Hall stands today. Building after building proclaimed the new affluence of the city. In 1844, Thomas Jackson designed a feast of sugary stucco, seemingly dripping in great pendants from the ceiling of St Malachy’s Roman Catholic church in Alfred Street. What fancy finery this is, to be sure!
Queen Victoria gave Belfast a city charter in 1888. Sir Charles Brett, in his book The Buildings of Belfast, tells us of a positive pearl of a poem that was written in her honour at the time:
She came in the grace of her
Womanly love,
An Irishman’s ardent
Affection to move
A richly carved representation of the Queen swathed in lace once sat in Durham Street. She was, I fear, demolished but was afterwards rescued by the National Trust and now sits waiting for a new home in a stable yard, somewhat unsuitably clad in lace from top to toe.
There are hauntingly mournful memorials commemorating the 1912 sinking of the Titanic dotted hither and thither throughout the City.
Sir Thomas Brock’s fine woman in front of the City Hall takes a lot of beating: with her barely-clad body honouring a drowning passenger being held aloft amidst the waves by two sea nymphs. You catch your breath at their beauty in bright, white shining marble.
I met an old gentleman there who could remember him and his mother waving handkerchiefs – he took his own out to show me – to bid the Titanic farewell.
No one made a greater architectural impression on the city than Charles Lanyon, the architect, engineer and politician, who had a host of Belfast’s buildings under his belt. The Crumlin Road Courthouse and jail and the public library, as well as the Custom House, are but a few magnificent mentions. His Tudor Gothicry at the Lanyon building, Queen’s University, has a great splendour, as does the Palm House in the Botanic Gardens.
To my delight, I discovered my great-great grandfather exhibited there, with a giant, 22lb bunch of black grapes. It earned him a prize at the 1874 Great International Fruit and Flower Show.
The Tropical Ravine, then the only man-made one in the world, was an exhilarating excitement. It was created by Charles McKim, the Gardens’ curator. It was said that his fingers were so green that he could raise a prize bloom from a seed planted in an empty flowerpot.
Stepping into the Ravine’s red-brick building is like finding yourself in a fairyland. Suddenly steeped in boilingly hot climes, with air that is heavy with humidity, you are surrounded on all sides by banana, cinnamon, coffee, sugar cane, aloe, ivory nut, rubber, bamboo, guava and grapefruit.
There is a small chain hanging amidst the leaves which, with one tug, activates a waterfall to roar through the palms, the mosses and the great ferns.
The City is particularly ennobled by its surroundings, with the mountainous crags of Craig Hill framed by the grand old buildings. Stand beneath the green domes of the City Hall and you see the full majesty of nature flanked by the Linen Hall Library – a more delightfully old-fashioned institution would be hard to find. On the other side of the street, the towers of the vast Providential Society rear up into the sky. Cave Hill, with its silhouette of a colossal human countenance, has all the appearance of a sleeping Napoleon – it is known locally as ‘Napoleon’s nose’.
In all the world – I do not exaggerate – there are few more splendid spots to drink than the Crown Liquor Saloon in Great Victoria Street. If there was ever a symbol of the bravery and beauty of Belfast in times gone by, this surely is it. Again and again, the Saloon was beset by ‘the Troubles’, and again and again it arose glitteringly afresh from the ashes. How I yearn to be surrounded by its splendours, as I write these recollections of the place, with its astonishingly elaborate decorations of 1885.
The Saloon is a beacon of Belfast. It burns bright in the heart of all who know it, with its etched mirrors painted in vivid hues that rise up from behind the sweep of the marble- and ceramic-covered bar.
With sumptuously carved, wooden screens, adorned with gilded Corinthian columns which shelter the imbibers, every inch of the place is encased with ornamental splendour. Heraldic creatures bearing such mottos as ‘Fortune favours the brave’ and ‘Love your country’ guard these entrancing ‘snugs’, into which customers can plunge for picturesque privacy.
Belfast is still marching forth with architectural gusto. The historical slipway that once sheltered the Titanic is now filled with a new and quite glorious exercise in modernism with the sensational tourist attraction, Titanic Belfast. The yellow cranes of the Harland & Wolff Shipyard still reign supreme where the great ship was designed, built and launched in 1912.
Exact replicas of the cabins have been recreated, along with the dining rooms and of course the staircase, all thanks to the Civic Arts, Todd Architects and the America-born architect Eric R Kuhne and Associates. A wealth of sights, sounds and smells tell the sombre story.
It is a modernistic marvel which took three years to conceive, design and create, resulting in a five-storey atrium, concealed by four 90ft-high hulls gleamingly clad in 3,000 individual silver and anodised aluminium shards. It is a triumph.
When I first came here, I saw the hauntingly lonesome but always fresh bunch of flowers left every day on the Titanic’s quayside. With such resilience and courage in the troubling times of the past, what triumphs must lie ahead today in times of peace.
