Belfast Stories and the Buildings That Already Know the Story…

There is something deeply irritating about replacing something you already own. A bike lost or stolen and bought again. A carton of milk picked up at the shop, only to come home and find another hiding in the fridge behind last night’s takeaway.

It’s that feeling of wasteful duplication.

I get that same feeling as Belfast moves forward with its £100 million Belfast Stories project.

Culture in Northern Ireland is almost everything. Once it enters the conversation, positions tend to harden. The recent launch of community and creative grants to help shape Belfast Stories shows a serious effort to involve local voices. If the museum is to explore the Troubles, as it surely must, those local voices will perhaps move beyond the familiar shorthand of “a few bad eggs” narrative sometimes heard on taxi tours, and into something more mature.

But before we get there, a simpler point. The idea that a major city should have a dedicated museum makes perfect sense. But this feels tactical rather than strategic.

This could have been the moment to restore and properly activate heritage buildings we are already spending public money stabilising, offering sticky plasters and first aid to structures that we walk past every day. 

If we were serious about that idea, we wouldn’t have to look far.

The Assembly Rooms

Standing at the corner of North Street and Waring Street sits the Assembly Rooms. Built in 1769, its walls have witnessed events far weightier than anything that could be packaged into a Jamie Dornan-narrated Castlebrooke/Tribeca commercial asking “Who you are?” The Assembly Rooms don’t need Hollywood – even if it happens to come from Holywood – to tell them who they are.

They hosted the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival. They saw Henry Joy McCracken court-martialled. They were the site of the 1786 rejection of a proposal to establish a slave-trading company. They survived the Belfast Blitz. They even rolled out the carpet for Belfast Fashion Week.

It is hard to find a building more saturated with civic history, but we have been here before.

The last twenty-five years have not been kind. The Assembly Rooms have appeared on the Heritage at Risk Register and more recently on the World Monuments Fund’s international “at risk” list. These days, being on a list is rarely a good sign.

Decay was visible from the street: roof damage, boarded windows, shrubs pushing through brickwork. Thankfully, the Council have stepped in and bought it back into public ownership. And while retrieving the keys from Castlebrooke is progress, knowing what to open with them is strategy.

Immediately behind it sits the Donegall Street surface car park – an expanse of tarmac at one of the most historically dense junctions in the city.

The material is already here. The Harp Festival and the United Irishmen upstairs. The Blitz interpreted in rooms and the courtyard that survived it. In that context, the Assembly Rooms are not simply a heritage project awaiting rescue. They are the start of a heritage trail.

The Floral Hall and Bellevue Steps

Above the Antrim Road, tucked beside Belfast Zoo, stands the Floral Hall. Built in the 1930s, it was not a chamber of debate or revolution. It was a place built for enjoyment.

For decades, the Floral Hall hosted dances, concerts, roller-skating and showbands. It was where people marked birthdays, courtships and ordinary Saturday nights.

It closed in 1972. What followed was deterioration visible to anyone passing: roof failure, asbestos concerns, structural issues. Recent council funding to replace the roof and make the structure watertight is welcome. It keeps the building standing. But it is, for now, first aid.

The Floral Hall is approached by the Bellevue Steps, a grand staircase that once made the journey upward feel ceremonial.

This site tells a different kind of Belfast story. Not rebellion or conflict, but social life. The showband era. The way leisure shifted as violence reshaped how and where people gathered.

It also sits away from the city centre, a reminder that the tourism dividend from telling Belfast’s story does not have to stop at Royal Avenue.

The building is already there. So are the memories.

St Joseph’s Church

Sailortown was once one of Belfast’s most tightly knit dockland neighbourhoods, a place of labourers, traders and families whose lives revolved around the harbour. Among them were Italian immigrants who settled around Little Patrick Street, creating what became known as “Little Italy.”

The construction of the M2 and other redevelopment in the late 1960s and early 1970s fractured the area. Rows of houses were demolished. Families were dispersed. A community that had taken generations to build was thinned out in a matter of years, leaving only a handful of buildings behind.

St Joseph’s Church remained.

In recent years, the building has secured heritage funding aimed at restoration and storytelling. Combined with the completion of York Street Station, plans for a Sailortown bridge and the rise of Clarendon Wharf, there is once again a line of sight between Sailortown and the rest of the city.

St Joseph’s could be more than a restored church. It could be the place where Belfast tells the story of migration, dock labour, trade, displacement and return, inside a building that survived it all.

That feels more honest than importing those stories into a brand-new structure somewhere else.

Carlisle Memorial Church

At Carlisle Circus, the sandstone tower of Carlisle Memorial Church dominates the junction. For over a century it has watched this part of the city change around it. For years the church stood closed and deteriorating, too significant to ignore, too complicated to fix. Now, through Belfast Buildings Trust, work is finally moving. A £220k Development Phase grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund is supporting detailed design work ahead of a proposed £2.9 million restoration phase.

The proposal here is simple: use Carlisle as the midpoint in a walkable line of the city’s most contested history.

To tell the story of the Troubles, follow this stretch of road: from the Assembly Rooms on North Street past St Anne’s Cathedral, on to St Patrick’s Church, Clifton House and Clifton Street Orange Hall, through Carlisle as the midpoint, and north to the Crumlin Road Courthouse(itself now subject to redevelopment plans) and the Crumlin Road Gaol.

And running beside it, the Westlink, built in the name of connection, yet cutting through communities and keeping the peace by keeping people apart. There would be a certain irony in telling the story of division and reconciliation in a building that overlooks one of its most concrete expressions.

A restored Carlisle would not just reopen a building. It would help stitch together a stretch of the city where religion, politics, law and imprisonment collided within a mile of pavement.

Belfast Electric Light Station

On Chapel Lane, facing Bank Square, stands a building that once powered Belfast.

The Belfast Electric Light Station opened in the late nineteenth century, part of the industrial expansion that transformed the city. It generated electricity for street lighting and for the tram network that once threaded through Belfast long before the car dominated its streets.

Today the building sits largely unnoticed, overshadowed by CastleCourt’s service yard and the habitual parking that shapes Bank Square. There are signs of life nearby – Mourne Seafood Bar and Kelly’s Cellars just around the corner, 2 Royal Avenue reopening as civic space – but the area still feels defined more by service entrances than public streets.

Restored properly, the Electric Light Station could become the place where the city tells its infrastructure story: electrification, trams and trolleybuses, transport planning, and the rise and retreat of public transit.

Recognising What We Already Have

None of this is an argument against Belfast Stories. A major city should have a serious way of telling its story. But here we are preparing to spend £100 million on a single museum while at least five historic buildings – and there are more – stand ready, each capable of carrying part of that story. 

Cities like London and New York do not confine their cultural institutions to a single address. Tate operates across multiple sites. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stretches from Fifth Avenue to the Cloisters. The story is not contained in one building; it is spread across a city.

Belfast had and still has that opportunity. The question is whether we recognise it or just patch it up.

Aaron Vennard is a Managing Consultant with 15 years in Financial Services across New York, Chicago, Toronto, London and Dublin while locally advocating to improve public transport and active travel across Greater Belfast through the Circle Line Campaign.