You may think you know Belfast, but you don't. This city of 645,000 is nothing less than an undiscovered European capital, with four five-star hotels (that's three more than Toronto), a Michelin-starred chef and the most opulent Victorian pub in the United Kingdom. It's where Anthony Trollope wrote his first successful novel while working at the post office; Jonathan Swift, C.S. Lewis and Seamus Heaney all found inspiration here.
So don't misunderstand recent headlines about the first political shootings here in more than a decade. There's more to Belfast than memories of violence, and this peace is not a fool's dream. This gorgeous, complicated city's natural state is more concerned with commerce than bullets and bombs. The Troubles were the anomaly, the recent shootings a thuggish blip. The miasma has lifted. Belfast really just wants to get down to business.
And business, these days, is all about hotels, restaurants, pubs and shops. There's so much here, and all of it so new, you get the impression there's some municipal overcompensation going on, as if all the Ulster businesspeople got together to make up for three decades when business here, when it was possible at all, was strictly local.
The whole city is in a tumult of improvement, using 2012 — the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic — as a goalpost.
A $750-million shopping complex, Victoria Square, opened last year, and an entirely new quarter of the city, the Titanic Quarter, with a museum, hotel, a banking centre, a college and 1,000 apartment units, will be completed within the next four years.
This Belfast bounce-back seems to be just as micro as it is macro, as much in evidence in hopeful small businesses as it is in grand municipal plans. One such business is KM Tour Guiding Services: The KM stands for Ken McElroy, a proud Ulsterman who used to supplement his schoolteacher's income by shuttling international journalists into the backrooms of Unionist and IRA strongholds to get their interviews. When that dark business dried up, he switched to tourists, taking an increasing number of British and Irish visitors past the sights outsiders had been ignoring for so long.
McElroy can be found striding around the town he's been striding around for the better part of three decades, pointing out the huge Ferris wheel next to the effulgent Victorian city hall, with its statue of proud Belfaster Lord Dufferin in front. Old linen warehouses, now lofts and shops and cafés, populate the square surrounding it, testament to its industrial revolution specialty.
Talking in his County Armagh accent, the vowels rounded and pressed right to the front of his mouth, a phonetic reminder of the region's geographical proximity to both Dublin and Glasgow, he'll tell you about Belfast's origins as a village, its explosion in the 18th century, alongside Manchester and Liverpool, into one of the industrial engines of the British empire, reaching its apogee in 1911 when its shipyards launched the Olympia and finished building its sister ship, the Titanic.
He'll still give you what he calls a "political tour," if you want, through east and west Belfast, past what's now called the Wall of Peace — where militants used to have their least bloody conflict, fought with cans of spray paint. (Giant murals, either Catholic Republican or Protestant Loyalist, can also be seen on the sides of buildings and walls in the Falls Road and Shankill Road areas, and in the Ballymurphy estate.) But McElroy prefers the pubs.
