Belfast (from the Irish: Béal Feirste meaning “The sandy ford at the river mouth”) is the capital of Northern Ireland. It is the largest city in Northern Ireland and the province of Ulster, and the second-largest city on the island of Ireland. In the 2001 census the population within the city limits (the Belfast Urban Area) was 276,459, while 579,554 people lived in the wider Belfast Metropolitan Area. This made it the fifteenth-largest city in the United Kingdom, but the eleventh-largest conurbation.
Belfast is situated on Northern Ireland’s eastern coast. The city is flanked to the northwest by a series of hills, including Cavehill, which is thought to be the inspiration for Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Belfast is located at the western end of Belfast Lough and at the mouth of the River Lagan making it an ideal location for the shipbuilding industry that once made it famous. When the Titanic was built in Belfast in 1912, Harland and Wolff had the largest shipyard in the world. Originally a town in County Antrim, the County borough of Belfast was created when it was granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1888.
Belfast saw the worst of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, with nearly half of the total deaths in the conflict occurring in the city. However, since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, there has been significant urban regeneration in the city centre including Victoria Square, Queen’s Island and Laganside as well as the Odyssey complex and the landmark Waterfront Hall. The city is served by two airports: The George Best Belfast City Airport adjacent to Belfast Lough and Belfast International Airport which is near Lough Neagh. Queen’s University of Belfast is the main university in the city. The University of Ulster also maintains a campus in the city, which concentrates on fine art and design.
History
Belfast is the anglicised version of Béal Feirste, the area’s Irish name, which translates as “mouth of the Farset River”, referring to the sand bar which formed where the River Farset enters the River Lagan at Donegall Quay, and flows into Belfast Lough. This forms the hub around which the city developed. The River Farset also gets its name from the word for ‘sand spit’—feirste in Irish. Superseded by the River Lagan as the more important river in the city, the Farset now languishes in obscurity, under High Street. The Farset formed a dock on High Street until the mid 19th century, and the open river can still be seen at the edge of the Shankill graveyard. Bank Street in the city centre refers not to banking, but to the river bank and Bridge Street was the site of an early a bridge across the Farset.
The site of Belfast has been occupied since the Bronze Age. The Giant’s Ring, a 5000 year old henge, is located near the city, and the remains of Iron Age hill forts can still be seen in the surrounding hills. Belfast remained a small settlement of little importance during the Middle Ages. John de Courcy built a castle on what is now Castle Street in the city centre in the 12th century, but this was on a lesser scale and not as strategically important as Carrickfergus Castle to the north, which was built by de Courcy in 1177. The O’Neill clan had a presence in the area. In the 14th century the Clan Aedh Buidh, descendants of “Yellow” Hugh O’Neill built Grey Castle at Castlereagh, now in the east of the city. Conn O’Neill also owned land in the area, one remaining link being the Connswater River flowing thorough east Belfast.
Belfast became a substantial settlement in the 17th century after being settled by English and Scottish] settlers during the Plantation of Ulster. In 1791, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast, after Henry Joy McCracken and other prominent Presbyterians from the city invited Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell to a meeting, after having read Tone’s “Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland”. Belfast blossomed as a commercial and industrial centre in the 18th and 19th centuries and became Ireland’s pre-eminent industrial city. Industries thrived, including linen, rope-making, tobacco, heavy engineering and shipbuilding, and at the end of the nineteenth century, Belfast briefly overtook Dublin as the largest and most industrialised city in Ireland. The Harland and Wolff shipyards became one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, employing up to 35,000 workers. Belfast was heavily bombed during World War II. In one raid, in 1941, German bombers killed around one thousand people and left tens of thousands homeless. Outside of London, this was the greatest loss of life in a night raid during the Battle of Britain.
Belfast has been the capital of Northern Ireland since its creation in 1920 by the Government of Ireland Act. Since it began to emerge as a major city, it has been the scene of much sectarian conflict between its Roman Catholic and Protestant populations. These opposing groups in this conflict are now often termed republican and loyalist respectively, although are also referred to as ‘nationalist’ and ‘unionist’. The most recent example of this is known as the Troubles – a civil conflict that raged from c.1969 to the late 1990s. Belfast saw the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, particularly in the 1970s, with rival paramilitary groups forming on both sides. Bombing, assassination and street violence formed a backdrop to life throughout The Troubles. The IRA detonated 22 bombs, all in a confined area in the city centre in 1972, on what is known as “Bloody Friday”, killing nine people. Loyalists paramilitaries, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) retaliated to the PIRA campaign by a series of killings. A particularly notorious group, based on the Shankill Road in the mid 1970s became known as the Shankill Butchers. In all, over 1,500 people were killed in political violence in the city from 1969 until 2001.
A legacy of the Troubles is that both republican and loyalist paramilitary groups in Belfast have become involved in organised crime and racketeering. On 20 December 2004, UK£26.4 million was stolen from the headquarters of the Northern Bank in Belfast City Centre, the largest cash robbery at the time in the United Kingdom. The police investigation linked the robbery to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Policing in Belfast is provided by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They reported annual decreases in recorded crime in East, North, and South Belfast between 2002 and 2006. West Belfast showed an increase in recorded crime during the same period
