I did not follow a map. I did not book a street art tour. I simply walked, camera in hand, and let Belfast show me what it wanted to show me.
It showed me quite a lot.
Belfast has a long and complicated relationship with walls and what gets painted on them. The political murals of the Falls and Shankill Roads are part of the city’s history, expressions of conflict and identity that the Troubles carved into the brickwork. But the street art I found in the Cathedral Quarter and the city centre tells a different story. Or rather, many different stories at once. Playful, tender, political in a quieter way, sometimes just beautiful. A city still working out who it is now.
The Big Ambitions
On Hill Street, down a narrow cobbled lane in the Cathedral Quarter, there is a mural that stops you. Two figures in period costume, frozen mid-duel, rendered in black and white with paint dripping down the brick like rain. A third figure watches, doing nothing. It is called The Duel of Belfast, Dance by Candlelight, painted by Irish artist Conor Harrington in 2012 for the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. Harrington has described it as a comment on colonialism, though he leaves the interpretation deliberately open. Whatever you bring to it, you feel its weight. And then you notice the beer kegs lined up in front of it, gleaming stainless steel, utterly indifferent. Belfast does that. It lets the serious and the everyday share the same frame.
On a long stretch of hoarding nearby, a different kind of scale. Two faces, a man and a woman, rendered in black and white against a swirling cosmos of colour: tropical birds, stacked books, a human heart, roses, poppies, the moon. It is overwhelming in the best sense. A commissioned piece for Belfast ONE, the city’s Business Improvement District, and the kind of work that makes you stop and stare and then go back for another look. The books in particular stay with you. A city of readers, saying so on its walls.
Also worth your neck: a towering mural on a brick building of a figure in a pink beanie, eyes closed, headphones on, hands resting on a reel-to-reel tape player. It is by KVLR, a Cathedral Quarter regular, and it has the quality of someone completely lost in music. Peaceful. You feel it.
The Quiet Human Moments
Not all of it shouts. Some of the best pieces barely raise their voice.
On a set of shutters, surrounded by daisies in teal and purple: It’ll be grand. Three words. The most Irish reassurance there is. Battered a little around the edges, stickers layered on top, but the message still perfectly legible. In a city that has had plenty to get through, those three words carry more weight here than anywhere else.
In an alleyway, on a dark brick wall: BE A BETTER PERSON in large green letters. Inside the red heart at the centre, someone has added in smaller writing: my family love you. It was not put there by the original artist. Someone passed this wall and felt they had something to add, and they were right.
On a large panel somewhere in the city centre, a young woman curled in an armchair, eyes closed, arms wrapped around her knees, surrounded by pink blossom and twilight. She is resting, or dreaming, or both. The brushwork is tender. You could look at her for a long time.
And then there is The Spaniard on Skipper Street, a bar whose entire upper facade has been painted as a deep, velvety night sky, stars and nebulae sprawling across the brickwork. The hanging baskets of trailing greenery at the first floor somehow make it more dreamlike rather than less. It is the kind of building you photograph and then stand back and photograph again.
Words Underfoot
Outside the Grand Central Hotel on Bedford Street, look down. Poetry has been set into the pavement itself, words spread across the flagstones so that you have to move around them to read the whole thing. Linen bleached. We see it breaking like a wave. From the cradle to the grave. You piece it together as you walk, the poem assembling itself under your feet. It is one of the most quietly affecting things in a city full of things to look at.
The Community Map
In the Cathedral Quarter, set into a wall, there is a large mosaic map of the neighbourhood rendered in ceramic tiles. The map itself is beautiful but it is the tiles that surround it that hold you. Hundreds of them, each one made and inscribed by a different person. Names and dates. Conal 03/06/93. Catherine 03/06/45. I believe in angels. The road was long and the hunger was on me. Peel Street. Ireland Belfast. W Henderson, Ballyleney, Antrim, 1825. Nothing is certain but change. The event in the tent 2003.
Some of them are funny. Some are heartbreaking. Some are just a name, pressed into clay, as if to say: I was here. This mattered… don’t forget.
You could spend an hour reading these tiles. I nearly did.
The Big Fish
Down at Donegall Quay, where the River Lagan meets the city, there is a ten-metre ceramic salmon. This is the Big Fish, also known as the Salmon of Knowledge, created by Belfast artist John Kindness in 1999. Each scale is a ceramic tile printed with a fragment of Belfast’s history: newspaper clippings, historical documents, children’s drawings, images from Tudor times through to the present day. The whole city, scaled and wrapped around a fish.
The name comes from an old Irish legend. Fionn mac Cumhaill gained all the world’s wisdom by tasting a magical salmon. The Big Fish is Belfast’s version of that idea: all the knowledge of this place, carried in one creature, sitting on the riverbank in the rain.
Everyday Art Across the City
Belfast also paints its utility boxes. Two matching ones near the Cathedral Quarter are covered in bold pink roses on teal and green, the petals large enough to see from across the street. A building near the waterfront, painted deep blue, carries an anchor, a lighthouse, a fish, and a Jacques Cousteau quote about the sea. On a construction hoarding, a black and white stencil of a figure with a PHOTO SCAN camera unit for a head, standing at profile, looking at nothing. Two words on the camera. A joke, a warning, a piece of street commentary that will be gone the moment the construction ends.
This is what Belfast does. It puts things on its walls because it has things to say. It always has. And now, perhaps more than ever, it is finding new ways to say them.
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