Belfast City Hall
An Edwardian baroque palace in Portland stone, ringed by gardens and monuments at the city's exact centre.
The red-brick Lanyon Building, completed in 1849, is one of the most photographed buildings in Belfast. Modelled loosely on the Founder's Tower at Oxford's Magdalen College, it gives Queen's University its postcard face and anchors the leafy university quarter of south Belfast.
Visitors are welcome to walk the front quadrangle and the Welcome Centre, and the surrounding streets of Victorian terraces, bookshops and cafés are among the most pleasant in the city for an unhurried stroll. The nearby Lyric Theatre and the independent Queen's Film Theatre keep the area culturally busy.
Queen's sits moments from both the Botanic Gardens and the Ulster Museum, so the three together make a natural half-day loop that shows Belfast at its most relaxed and green.


An Edwardian baroque palace in Portland stone, ringed by gardens and monuments at the city's exact centre.
The seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, set in a grand hilltop estate open to the public.
A 35-metre Gothic clock tower from 1869 that tilts off-vertical on its reclaimed-marsh foundations.