The City of Belfast

For all the infamy 'The Troubles' has brought it, the City of Belfast in Northern Ireland has an amazing story to tell.

At the start of the 1600's this was a small village at the mouth of the River Farset. Less than two hundred years later, the Belfast of the 1880's was the shipbuilding, linen-making and tobacco-manufacturing capital of the world. 

Even today heavy industry plays a major role in the economic life of the city, with the wings of Airbus's A220 airliner being manufactured by Spirit Aerosystems in its facility at Sydenham, East Belfast. 

On our sixty minute virtual journey we will explore:

How Belfast - far from being a hotbed of intolerance - was in fact the birthplace of liberal and democratic ideals in the Enlightenment Period of the late 1700's.

What made Belfast the industrial metropolis it became in the nineteenth century - a city with an industrial output well out of proportion to its modest population. 

The engineering geniuses of Belfast who invented the world's first air-conditioning systems, designed the largest ocean-going liner in the world (Titanic) as well as the elegant flying boats of the 1920's and 30's.

How intermittent periods of sectarian strife have at times slowed the progress of this great city, giving rise to communal suffering for adherents of both the Nationalist and Unionist traditions.

What the 'state of play' is at present. With the Good Friday Agreement still in place but the local Parliament suspended, and the 'Northern Protocol' currently the subject of a bitter EU/UK dispute - what does the future hold in store for the City of Belfast?