City mixes old and new,
Victorian and vivaciousBy Jack Holland
Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. At least, she did not look amused as she gazed down on a sunny July morning from her plinth outside Belfast’s City Hall on the gathering on the lawn. Young men and women, mostly in black, wearing Mohawk haircuts and pierced in every conceivable manner, had gathered on the green around her statue to sit, talk, and swig soft drinks. It looked like a punk-rock fashion reunion. But it was not untypical of the sights the traveler to Belfast might encounter these days, as the old Victorian city witnesses a new 21st century version of itself springing up all around it.
The inscription on Queen Victoria’s plinth says, with Victorian piety: "From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them."
"What a sweet old lady," said one of the youths as he read it.
Not everyone would agree with that description, but that sunny morning the city seemed far removed from the political battles of the past and present. The climax of Northern Ireland’s marching season, the 12th of July, had come and gone. The sounds of marching feet and Lambeg drums had faded as another of what could be Ulster’s greatest folk festival (if only the politics could be extracted) became history. And some, such as Mary Jo McCanny, could go back to counting hotel beds rather than controversial marches. McCanny is the director of communications for the new Visitors Welcome Center in Donegal Place, a few steps away from the City Hall.
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She reports that the number of hotel beds available in the city has trebled since 1994 to almost 4,000. And it is still growing. Last October, the Posthouse Premier opened on Ormeau Avenue, across from the BBC. It added 170 bedrooms to the Belfast total, and cost around $23 million with a on-site Health and Fitness Club that boasts a magnificent swimming pool. According to the managing director, Patrick Dempsey, the Posthouse is in keeping with "the modern stylish look of Belfast."
It will soon be followed by the Ramada at Shaw’s Bridge, just south of the city, along the River Lagan, with 120 rooms; the Metro Hotel, with 250 bedrooms, which will be going up on Gt. Victorian Street, near the old Victorian working-class district of Sandy Row (the only one in the city still extant). It will rise near the Europa — Belfast’s most famous hotel and for a while during the Troubles the only one in the city center — which continues to meet the challenge of new competitors and has expanded its room capacity with an extension that has added 56 bedrooms.
Meanwhile, 10 Square on Donegal Square is nearing completion. According to McCanny, this "boutique-style" hotel with only 25 rooms will cater to the high-end of the tourist market, with its own members’ bar and other exclusive facilities. The most striking thing about 10 Square is its location. It occupies a 19th century building behind the City Hall, renowned for its sculptures of the heads of great scientists and philosophers that every child who has been raised in the city remembers peering up at and quizzing his parents about. 10 Square is following in the footsteps of the already established McCauslands, a 61-bedroom hotel on Victoria Street near the Albert Clock. McCausland’s, opened in late 1998, and is situated in a renovated seed warehouse, a stone’s throw from Belfast’s dockside. Both hotels represent a synthesis of the old Belfast with the new.
Mary Jo McCanny believes there is still plenty of room for growth in Belfast’s hotel industry as the number of overnight visitors to the city continued to increase. 1999 saw a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Seventeen thousand more visitors came to the city last year as compared with 1999. This year, it is expected that the rate of increase will slow as a result of an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease last spring and the political upheavals of the summer. Other comparably sized cities are still far ahead of Belfast in hotel bedrooms available. As of 1999 Dublin had a 12,000-hotel-bedroom capacity and Glasgow 15,000.
In other tourist facilities, however, Belfast is catching up. The Visitors’ Welcome Center and Convention Bureau itself is a sort of combination of art gallery, museum and shop, full of articles and artifacts relating to Belfast. You can pick up everything from a pair of Guinness socks to imitation memorabilia of the Titanic. The center can claim to have one Belfast’s only two Internet cafes, Café Mac, run by Willie Anderson, who also owns the other one. Called Bronco’s Internet café, it is located a few steps from the Europa Hotel on Gt. Victoria Street. On any summer’s afternoon, Bronco’s bustles with an international clientele busy exploring the net or writing e-mails home. The 29-year-old Anderson, who confesses he hates computers, is part of the new Belfast, eager to exploit the business opportunities that have blossomed in the wake of the peace process.
It does not take long to reach back a few years in the form of another of the city’s less well known attractions — a café of a different sort, related to books rather than computers, called Book Finders. For the last 18 years Book Finders, opposite Queen’s University at 47 University Rd., has welcomed book lovers, writers, poets, and artists of all descriptions. Run by Mary Denvir, it is redolent not of Victorian Belfast but of the city as it was in the 1960s, when young poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley began to publish their first poems. There, while browsing among hard-to-find tomes and antiquarian rarities, you can sip a coffee or enjoy a light lunch of soup and sandwiches. Empty wine bottles acting as candle holders adorn the little tables and the walls are covered with posters of poets and artists and notices of poetry readings, lectures and talks — an expression of the literary life of the city. The book shop smells of soup, baps and fusty books.
"It was always called the bohemian café," Denvir said. "Writers just come and sit writing in the corners all the time."
The new Belfast, however, reminds us that other, very different forms of communication are springing up. The W5 Interactive Discovery Center, which is part of the $190 million Odyssey Sports and Leisure complex, just recently opened, is a striking example. W5 — standing for who-what-where-when-why — is something between a science museum, a laboratory and a playground, providing visitors of all ages with hands-on experience in relation to science, engineering and technology, making links to art, education and design. Among its 100 exhibits are those allowing the visitor to build robots and bridges, experiment with wind tunnels, and to play a harp which has laser beams instead of strings.
Though futuristic in form, its emphasize on practical science very much links it to the old Victorian Belfast, of which the Goliath Crane at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard is a nearby and constant reminder.
Out and about
€ The Posthouse Premier Hotel is at 22 Ormeau Ave., Belfast BT2 8H5, tel: 44-870 400 9005. Nightly rate is £109 sterling.
€ The Europa Hotel is on Gt. Victoria Street, Belfast BT2 7AP, tel: 44-2890-327000. Nightly rate is £105 sterling single, £145 double. Weekend rates are lower.
€ W5 is at the Odyssey, 2 Queen’s Quay, Belfast BT3 9QQ, tel: 44-2890- 467700. Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday noon to 6 p.m. Admission: adult £5 sterling, Child £3 sterling.
€ Bronco’s Internet Café is at 122 Gt. Victorian St., Belfast BT2 7AP.
€ Café Mac is in the Visitor’s Center 47 Donegall Place, Belfast BT.