Belfast Blooms

Belfast is a city that is moving on from its recent past. It still suffers from a tarnished image but that compares little to the city now. The city is bustling with lots of new developments and there is an air that is positive and lively. I lived in the city for several years and my advice is if you are planning to visit set aside most of what you've heard about Belfast, because those images of the past are just that - past.

The great city may have encroached into surrounding towns but the city centre is compact and easily walkable. There are lots of restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs, and clubs in the centre to suit most tastes and pockets, and equally plenty of places to stay. The city is busy during the day and evening with people out enjoying life; the city centre is fairly safe.

Belfast may be a small city but it is a historic city with a rich Victorian heritage evident in many of the grand buildings. However, the last few years, as the city moves forward, there have been many new developments of hotels, new offices, housing, and shopping with the new Vitoria Square in the city centre still being built. It's an interesting collage of old and new sitting side by side and there is an air of optimism and growing confidence in it.

There are no lack of places to go and things to see from numerous parks to the infamous murals to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum which attempts to recreate life in the past. Or a short bus or train journey will take you out to several of the surrounding towns such as Carrickfergus with its grand Norman castle or to the seaside town of Bangor. Then again, Northern Ireland is so small that most places are at most two hours away, so it's quite possible to see some of the famed sights of Northern Ireland like the Giants Causeway. 

Belfast is a bustling and interesting city and it's worth taking the time to come and explore it and see it in a new light as Belfast is blooming.

Quick Tips:

The Tourist Information Welcome Centre is based on Royal Avenue - the main shopping street - and has decent free maps of the city centre and other information.

To get the lie of the land there are several tour options - bus tours, walking tours, and black taxi tours which cover areas that were mos affected by the Troubles as well as the infamous painted murals.

Note Northern Ireland is part of the UK and so uses sterlings not euros- though some shops will take euro notes but don't expect the best exchange rate. If you are planning to travel into the republic there is a handy cash machine dispensing euros opposite the city hall.

Best Way To Get Around:

Belfast has two airports - the George Best City Airport (sometimes still referred to as Harbour Airport) and the International Airport (known to locals often as Aldergrove), note that the International airport is 20 miles out of the city. Both are linked by buses to the city centre and taxis are also available.
Belfast city centre is compact and easy  to walk around, but if you are planning to go slightly further then Northern Ireland has one company that controls all public transport - Translink - their website has details of all their services and a useful journey planner. There are three main form of transport - Ulsterbus covers NI with buses, NIR is the trains and then Metro which is not an underground/subway its the name of the buses that cover Belfast. Ulsterbus has two main stations in Belfast - Europa on Great Victoria Street and Laganside. The most useful train station is Great Victoria Street (which is connected to the Europa bus terminal) in the city centre, but train routes are fairly limited. There are also crossborder train and bus services run by Translink and the Republic's transport services, but the cheapest option of travel to Dublin is the Aircoach which also has an office in the Europa Bus Centre.
Metro - city buses have most of their routes centred around City Hall, it's a matter of knowing your route number and then finding the precise stop. There is a route 100 bus which loops around the city centre and links the main bus and train stations.

Or if you feel like splashing out for a taxi, there are several taxi companies - but there are two main types of taxis - those that can be hailed or caught at a taxi rank and those that must be phone booked such as ValueCabs and Abjet, with quite a few free phones available to ring them. Legal taxis must display a special plate, normal on the bumper, which is the license to operate and so it will be dated and have the details of the car.

There are two Café Renoir - the one in the city centre on Queen Street is a popular coffee shop open during the day. The other is on Botanic Avenue and during the day is quite similar in being a coffee shop but it stays open into the evening with a dinner menu. The atmosphere in Café Renoir on Botanic is more relaxed than the one in the city centre, where it feels a little frantic but the quality of the food balances this out.

It has to be said the coffee is average but the tray bakes, desserts, and scones are simply divine - I love the chocolate brownies and the malteaser cake, and the variety of scones are great like blueberry and white chocolate which go great with a pot of tea.

The lunch menus are similar in both cafés with fantastic tasty soups, freshly made sandwiches and toasties, and all sorts of other goodies. The café in the city centre can get very busy at lunch time with a long queue waiting to be served but generally you can get a table.

The café on Botanic Avenue also stays open into the evening. I can't quite remember what's on the menu, except pizza, though I have eaten here a couple of times. But the pizza menu is quite different with very unusual combinations - and despite them sounding dubious it's worth being adventurous because the pizzas I and those I've been with have been delicious.

I'll certainly highly recommend this place for a tea and a bun or for lunch. There are lots of other dinner options elsewhere that are probably better.

This green oasis, close to Queens University, is a delightful haven from the busyness of the city. The garden was opened in 1828 but became a public park in 1895 and is now run by the City Council.

The key feature is the Palm House, which was built in 1840 and designed by Charles Lanyon (who also designed Queens University). It is one of the earliest curvilinear cast iron glasshouse, predating the famed greenhouse in the Kew Gardens in London.

The other building in the gardens is the Tropical Ravine which was built by the head gardener in 1889. It an unusual design with a a sunken ravine full of tropical plants and balconies built around its edge. There is also a pond at the end of the building with waterlilies and fish which children tend to love.

At the main entrance to the park is a statue of Lord Kelvin the famed scientist who is known for creating the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature and who was born in Belfast. There is also a playpark at the lower end of the park closest to the river, beside the PEC centre. Plus often during the summer there is an ice-cream van in the park.

I used to live beside the gardens and miss walking through them everyday. I loved on a cold winters day slipping into the warm Palm House or Tropical Ravine and enjoying the bright colours and interesting plants in contrast to the barren brown winter. The gardens are interesting at anytime of year. In summer the rose garden is full of beautiful scent, and the long herbaceous borders ablaze in glorious and varied colours, and there are wide lawns to sprawl on and enjoy the sunshine. In spring the grounds are full of crocuses and daffodils.

The gardens are open all year from early morning until sunset. The Palm House and Tropical Ravine are open Mon-Fri 10am-12 and 1pm-4pm and Saturday and Sunday from 1pm - 5pm. Entrance to the gardens is free.
I loved walking everyday in these gardens and now miss not living beside them. It was a lovely place to relax and be refreshed in its lush greenness. If you are visiting Belfast, the gardens are a pleasant walk in the city, or to sit and rest before continuing on. The gardens also neighbour several other Belfast sights including Queens University and the Ulster Musuem. The area lively with lots of students and there are lots of cafes and restaurants especially on Stranmillis Road and Botanic Avenue.

Queens is one of the oldest universities in the UK and Ireland and has a good international standing. It was set up as one of three colleges in Ireland that made up the Queens University in Ireland but in 1908 the colleges in Galway and Cork became the National University of Ireland and the college in Belfast became Queen's University of Belfast.

The main building was designed by Charles Lanyon, like so much of Belfast architecture. Although the front section of this red-brick building is stunning, much of what made up the quad behind it were knocked down in the 1960s and replaced with ugly concrete cubes, which is a real tragedy. Though the quad is still pleasant especially in spring with cherry trees blossoming.

The Great Hall which is accessed from the quad is normally open for coffee and lunch. Its a beautiful room with a huge high ceiling. It recently went under major renovations to return it to the original design, with its distinctive black and white checked floor and the wooden pannelled walls covered in portraits of many university dignitaries. There is also an art gallery that is open to the public.
I studied at Queens so I'm probably too familiar with the place. IT may not be a site in itself but if you are in the area why not walk through the main building's entrance hall and have a quick look around and either get a coffee in the Great Hall, or to admire the external architecture, there is a good coffee shop across the road in the Student's Union which over looks the front of Queens. Next to Queens are the Botanic Gardens and the Ulster Museum which are well worth visiting. As this is a major student area there are lots of bars, cafes and restaurants in the vicinity as well, many of which are good value.

Carrickfergus is a town on Belfast Lough that has been merged into Belfast, and as such is a short bus journey out of the city centre. The castle dates back to the Normans who invaded Ireland in the 12th century, with John de Courcy starting it, but over 800 years has been changed and adapted. It stands right on the edge of the water and is quite a spectular sight - if you travel in by ferry you'll see it, and even flying in it looks impressive. There are also great views over the lough and all the boats and ferries sailing on it.

Its a fairly boxy castle, its not a romantic vision with no turrets or towers in sight. It was designed to be defensive, thus it has huge thick stone walls. Its use and importance varied over the centuries, even being used as a prison in the 18th century and was also used as a air raid shelter in World War Two. It was also the site of where William of Orange landed in 1690 first set foot in Ireland - and so has quite a long active history.

The castle's keep is the earliest building remaining and you can still climb up the narrow stairs to the top. There are several displays on each floor which detail life in the castle - from the kitchens on the ground floor to a figure sitting on a latrine on one of the upper floors. But its not fully decked out like it would have been.

There are information boards scattered around the castle which are very informative and give details about each part of the castle. There is no formal tour but rather just wander around with one of the leaflets provided when you buy a ticket and read the information boards. There are also several figures scattered around the place to give a sense of what life was like - there is a nice knight riding on his horse which is a good place to climb up on for a photo.

If you are visiting Belfast for the weekend this provides an easy option to see a castle, but if you are visiting other areas of Ireland there are probably more spectacular yet this is a good solid castle that is well maintained and well managed, and still has a feel that it is as it was.

The castle is open daily 10am -4pm in winter and 10am-6pm in summer on weekdays but has shorter opening hours on Sundays - its probably best to check out opening hours on the website at
http://www.ni-environment.gov.uk/carrick.shtml
Equally check-out if there are any special events on.
Tickets are only £3 and concessions are half of that - and that makes it great value to a well-preserved and impressive castle. There is a small giftshop but no cafe - but Carrickfergus town centre is close by if you want lunch or a coffee.

Carrickfergus castle is somewhere I tend to take overseas visitors to, firstly as its quite accessible in its location with lots of car parking. It is a good example of a castle - and not a ruin like so many others across the island, and has a lovely position on the waterfront. Its also a good castle option for kids as its enclosed and well-maintained -so little chance of stones falling on top of you. I would recommend this castle as a good place to visit.

The Grand Opera House is a grand Victorian building that is a landmark of Belfast that opened as a theatre in 1895 It didn't have a smooth history being converted to a cinema and then in the 1970s being threatened by demolish. However, it was saved and with some help reopened as a theatre. The Opera House has undergone recent renovations with a new extension added to improve the facilities. However, the new extension has raised quite a bit of debate because the contrast between the Opera house's architecture and the modern style of the extension. When I first saw it I wasn't sure but its grown on me, and it definitely has improved the facilities of the Opera House.

The Opera House puts on a great variety of performances and the details of what is on can be found on its website at: www.goh.co.uk
Over the years I've seen several performances in the Opera House but since the renovations I've only been in to see the Christmas pantomine, which was Peter Pan. The new entrance was great as is the extra bars that the extension provides. We had tickets in the gallery, which although very high up, gave us great views of the stage. The theatre isn't very deep, so the horizontal distance was quite small and we didn't feel far away and felt part of the performance. The pantomine was as usual well done and great fun. For those of you unsure of a pantomine, its based on a children's story, with ridiculous characters and the audience expected to boo, hiss and shout at appropriate times. If you have the opportunity to go and see a pantomine go, as its great fun and part of British culture, unfortuntely they tend to run in winter.

The Opera House is landmark that stands out on Great Victoria Street and its richness and opulence are clear in both its interior and exterior. There are tours available - you can check the website for details. But the best way to see the Opera House is to see a performance here.