TOURS

Free tours of the Library and its collections are available each week, during which an experienced member of staff will tell you of aspects of the Library's tumultuous history, including:

The Library's role in the 1798 United Irish Rebellion
The Library's place in the development of Belfast over the past two centuries
Hangings, Embezzlement, Eviction...and more!

Every Wednesday at 11.30am:
The Linen Hall Library, its history and Collections.

1st Saturday of each month at 11am:
How to use the Linen Hall Library and its Collections

All tours last approximately 1 hour.

Places should be booked in advance through the Library. Please contact Gerry Healey
T: 028 9032 1707; F: 028 90343 8586; E: g.healey@linenhall.com.

Of course, groups can still book tours of the Library for other times. Please contact Patricia Saunders
T: 028 9032 1707; F: 028 9043 8586; E: p.saunders@linenhall.com.

A LITERARY TOUR OF CENTRAL BELFAST

In response to requests following our summer city centre literary tours, we are now making a virtual tour available online for you to print out and follow (see below). Beginning in the historic Linen Hall itself, where many of Northern Ireland's greatest writers have found creative inspiration, the tour takes in a number of venues made famous in the texts of Ireland's best known historical and contemporary writers (including Louis MacNeice, Tom Paulin, Robert McLiam Wilson, Frank Ormsby, Glenn Patterson, Forrest Reid, Seamus Heaney, Brian Moore, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson and John Hewitt). Readers will have the chance to find out a little about their lives and find out about the changing face of the city through some of the books which have made it famous.

LINEN HALL LIBRARY: LITERARY TOUR OF CENTRAL BELFAST

A Tour of Belfast's Literary Heritage
This 'tour' in prose is designed to provide a snapshot of the literary heritage of central Belfast. The city's portrayal in print, as you would expect, is mixed. A representative image comes from the work of Belfast poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), who wrote in Zoo that his conception of Belfast 'demanded that it should always be grey, wet, repellent and its inhabitants dour, rude and callous.'

MacNeice, born in Belfast into an ecclesiastical family, is often referenced as part of the 'thirties generation' of British poets with contemporaries like W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Thankfully, however, his version of Belfast is not shared by other writers, who portray the city as a vibrant place, flawed but alive, with plenty of character.

Begin the literary trail in the Linen Hall Library in the city centre, opposite City Hall. This historic library has been a haven for many of the city's most prominent writers, among them Tom Paulin, poet, critic and acerbic cultural commentator, who portrays the Linen Hall as a kind of sanctuary, writing of the 'style and discipline' ingrained in 'that eighteenth century, reasoned library' in his poem 'To The Linen Hall.'

Outside the side entrance of the Library is Fountain Street, the setting for a chapter in the novel Eureka Street by the Belfast writer Robert McLiam Wilson, recently named as one of Granta magazine's best British writers. The novel is a blackly comic look at 1990s Belfast during the embryonic peace process and is one of the finest Belfast novels. However, midway through the novel Wilson describes the carnage caused by a bomb detonating in Fountain Street during a busy weekday lunchtime, focusing especially on a young insurance clerk named Rosemary Daye who, entering a shop outside Queen's Arcade as the blast occurs, 'stopped existing.'

Leaving Fountain Street cross Wellington Place and walk along Upper Queen Street and Brunswick Street to Amelia Street, from where you can see the Europa Hotel and the famous Crown bar. Due to its proximity to the old Great Northern Railway station, and the nearby travellers' hotels, Amelia Street was once at the heart of Belfast's red light district, a fact commemorated by well-known local poet Frank Ormsby in his sombre poem about the area entitled 'Amelia Street' which describes the street as 'the sum of lasting miseries.' The history of the area is referenced in a statue of two women outside the Great Northern Mall.

Walk back to the rear of City Hall, to find 5-6 Donegall Square South. This is now a bank but is the former site of the International Hotel, which hosted the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in January 1967, on the cusp of 'the troubles.' Glenn Patterson, one of Ireland's most renowned novelists, and a resident of Belfast, captured this era and the atmosphere of the old hotel in his novel The International, which recalls life in the city through the eyes of the teenage hotel barman, Danny Hamilton.

Cross Donegall Square, entering the public lawns at the front of City Hall. This ornate building is the centre piece of the city. It was completed in 1906, having been originally commissioned in 1888. As the first building which visitors tend to focus on, the City Hall often comes to symbolize something of what they feel about the city. E.M. Forster, the great English writer of such classics as A Passage to India, A Room with a View and Howard's End, often visited Belfast to stay with the local novelist Forrest Reid, and collected some impressions in his 1936 volume Abinger Harvest. Wryly referring to political tensions, he described City Hall as 'a costly Renaissance pile, which shouts "Dublin can't beat me" from all its pediments and domes, but it does not succeed in saying anything else.' More positively, Kate O'Brien, the renowned Irish novelist, contrasted the 'unappealing' aspect of the building with the 'unheeding grace' of Belfast's people in her travelogue My Ireland.

Move to the front gates of City Hall, facing Donegall Place. Of course, local writers have also depicted City Hall and its environs. One of the best depictions of the area appears in The Red Hand of Ulster, a satirical novel about the 'Home Rule' crisis of the early twentieth century, penned by George Birmingham, the pseudonym of Rev. James Owen Hannay, a Protestant Nationalist and clergyman. At one point in the novel, an English visitor to the city watches a riotous crowd assemble in Donegall Place, and fears for 'some of the best shops in the town which are on either side of this street.'

Marks & Spencer department store is across the road, on your right. When this store came to the city, in the late sixties, it was regarded as a sign of hope that more national investment would flood into Belfast, and the store came to symbolize a cherished 'normality' throughout the 'troubles.' However, it was not immune to other events, a fact reflected in a passage in Seamus Heaney's Preoccupations. Heaney is now one of the most famous English language poets in the world, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995. Heaney is more often associated with Derry, but taught at Queen's University in Belfast in the 1970s. In Preoccupations he recalls 'the perils of the department stores,' which were a frequent target for incendiary bombs, and writes of being caught in a bomb scare while paying for pyjamas in Marks & Spencer.

Walk along Donegall Place to Castle Place, at the junction with Royal Avenue. This is one of the oldest parts of the city, and is the backdrop of a pivotal scene in Brian Moore's famous novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, the story of a friendless woman in 1950s Belfast. The novel was eventually produced as a film starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, although, incongruously, it was shot in Dublin. Brian Moore was born in Belfast and wrote a number of novels set in the city. However, he emigrated in his twenties, becoming a successful and lauded writer in North America. In one passage in Judith Hearne, J.P. Madden, recently returned to the city, attempts to have a day out in Belfast, but is disillusioned by the drab places he encounters and 'when the bus deposited him at Castle Junction, he turned towards a public house,' probably Kelly's Cellars just behind Primark.

Walk along Royal Avenue to Castle Court shopping centre, then go through the centre to Smithfield market, across the road from the back entrance to the centre. Smithfield is now rather unattractive and dilapidated, but dates as a market from 1780. Until relatively recently, it was famous for its second hand book stalls, and therefore assumes an almost mythical status in work by some local writers. Two of our finest poets, Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson have visited the area in their poetry, Longley in 'The Rag Trade,' where the market becomes a metaphor for a relationship, and Carson in 'Smithfield Market.' Both poets live in Belfast, and have recently won major awards Longley the Hawthornden Prize and Carson the Forward Prize. Ciaran Carson is currently the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University.

Return to Royal Avenue, and walk, via North Street, to Writers' Square facing St. Anne's Cathedral. Under the arch at Writers' Square the first quotation you will see is from the work of the poet John Hewitt, free-thinker and socialist. Hewitt maintained a lifelong commitment to articulating a distinctive Northern Irish regional culture in his work, and his quest is commemorated in the John Hewitt Summer School, which runs every summer. From Writers' Square you can glimpse the attractive facade of Belfast Central Library, fondly remembered by Hewitt in his poem 'Reading' as a 'red-brick haven,' while the John Hewitt bar is a mere 100 yards away, along North Street towards the city centre.