09/11/2012

Belfast Book Marks 400th Anniversary

A new urban history of Belfast City is being published with support from the City Council and Queen’s University.

'Belfast 400: People, Place and History' will be published by Liverpool University Press to mark the 400th anniversary of the granting of Belfast's City Charter in 1613.

The book has been written by historians, archaeologists, geographers and social scientists from Queen's University and NUI, Maynooth, and led by Professor Sean Connolly from Queen's School of History and Anthropology.

£60,000 of grants was put up by the Leverhulme Trust for the project, which has been three years in the making.

The book will explore developments in Belfast's urban history, from its emergence as a settlement, its rise as an industrial town to urban decay and renewal.

It will show how Belfast grew to one of the world's centres of shipbuilding and linen manufacture and the effects of industrialisation and subsequent decline on citizens.

Editor of the book and Professor of Irish History at Queen's University Belfast, Sean Connolly, said: "This is one of those opportunities that comes along once or twice in a career. Over the past few years specialists in several fields have started to show us just how much there is to be discovered about Belfast past and present."

The Lord Mayor of Belfast, Alderman Gavin Robinson, commented: "There have been many books written about our city's rich history, but this is undoubtedly the most ambitious, and also the most timely, coinciding as it does with the 400th anniversary of the granting of the original charter.

"It will be a worthy addition to the canon of literature on our city, and no doubt will be essential reading for everyone with an interest in the story of what has made the Belfast we know today."

(IT/GK)

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