How Belfast's art and music are helping locals look to the future

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"I remember this area in the 1970s, it was a riot — quite literally, at times," says Dolores Vischer as we stroll along Bedford Street in Belfast's Linen Quarter, on the southern edge of the city centre. "I say literally because I remember The Clash turning up for a gig across the street from here in 1977, only to be turned away as the venue thought the rowdy punk rock band from England would attract trouble.

"It was true — they did," she adds as we reach our first stop: the Ulster Hall music venue. "But only because the gig was cancelled."

I'm on a music tour of Belfast with blonde-haired local music aficionado and Creative Belfast Tours guide Dolores, who's wearing a punkish black leather jacket and corduroy flat-peaked cap. Earlier, she'd described how she'd once played the drums with British punk band The Stranglers. During their 1979 gig, she'd climbed on stage and persuaded the drummer, the late Jet Black, to let her play along to their hit Peaches. "He said he needed the toilet anyway, so he let me have a go."

Dolores's music tours on foot and by bus predominantly showcase some of Belfast's homegrown talent. Among them is the city's original pop star, the late Ruby Murray, whose contribution to the city is celebrated with a plaque inside the Ulster Hall. In the 1950s, when she was at her musical height, Ruby broke the record as the artist with the most singles in the UK's official Top 20 chart simultaneously — five. She held on to this until Ed Sheeran released his Divide album in 2017. "I say to most people: if you've heard of her, it's likely from Cockney rhyming slang," Dolores says, referring to the fact that 'Ruby Murray' is a term for curry that has become ubiquitous in the UK.

Another local talent is Terri Hooley, the Belfast record store and label owner responsible for the success of Northern Irish punk bands like The Undertones and The Outcasts. "In the 2013 film Good Vibrations, the final scene depicts the sold-out Ulster Hall gig in 1980 where Terri announced the closure of the record store on stage, and The Outcasts performed a raucous show," says Dolores. Terri is depicted in a mural on the site of his former record store on Great Victoria Street, a few minutes' walk from the Linen Quarter.

Belfast is a city known for its grand Victorian and Edwardian architecture — and some of the best examples lie along Bedford Street's broad avenue. Here, the palatial, red-brick Venetian gothic architecture of the area's former factories stands tall alongside the grand Victorian facade of the Ulster Hall. The latter's original features include a wrought-iron canopy sheltering its entrance, beneath which Charles Dickens, the Dalai Lama and Irish rock band U2 have all stood at one point in time or another.

"The Ulster Hall was built in 1862, and was intentionally sandwiched between the many linen factories and showrooms that back then lined these pavements," says Dolores. "It was purpose-built to entertain the city's growing population, which shot up from 25,000 people in 1801 to some 350,000 a century later, and first opened solely with live classical music. Today, it's very different, with everything from comedy to rock and opera to jazz in there."

Linen was one of the industries that helped Belfast prosper — alongside ship building, which resulted most notably in RMS Titanic. At its early 20th-century peak, the Belfast region accounted for around 80 linen factories, which employed 47,000 people. By 1901, the city had overtaken Dublin to become the largest on the island of Ireland. And with the booming population came a boom in Belfast's music— by 2021, this waterside city was a UNESCO City of Music.

"Up until the late 1960s, everybody wanted to play Belfast, but that changed," says Dolores, pausing to pull out a Bluetooth speaker from her satchel. "We had all the big bands like The Beatles playing here, but for a 30-year period from the 1970s onwards, most of them stopped coming."

The reason? The Troubles — the violent nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until 1998, which saw mostly Protestant unionists, who wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom, clashing with mostly Catholic nationalists, who wanted Northern Ireland to join the Republic of Ireland. Around 3,600 lives were lost and 47,000 people were wounded before a resolution was reached. The Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, calling for peace and setting up a new government in Northern Ireland that represented both unionists and nationalists.

Only one artist repeatedly performed in Belfast during The Troubles: Irish singer-songwriter Rory Gallagher, who was born in Donegal, raised in Cork and lived in Belfast. He now, too, has a commemorative plaque inside the Ulster Hall. "He was one of the only artists to insist on playing here when everyone else refused," says Dolores, pressing play on his biggest hit, Bad Penny, a track where his guitar soars over his throaty vocals.

"Most notably, in 1974, he went ahead with a gig right here in the Ulster Hall even though bombs were going off outside," she says. "He brushed it off by saying everyone was safer inside than out there." Gallagher made a point of stopping here on every single Irish tour during that time, which meant his music was widely seen as an escape from The Troubles. "It brought both sides, Catholic and Protestant, together for a couple of hours, which nobody else could seem to do."

Writing on the walls Remnants of The Troubles can still be found in Belfast, decades since the peace agreement was signed. The following day, I find political murals depicting the period on the Falls and Shankill roads, including a kaleidoscopic depiction of Bobby Sands, the IRA leader who died on hunger strike in prison in 1981. At the Sunflower pub, a 15-minute walk north from the Linen Quarter, a security cage from the 1980s remains as a relic of social history. A black metal sign on the side reads: 'no topless sunbathing, Ulster has suffered enough'.

"The city is anti-establishment due to its politics," says guide Adam Turkington, stroking his ginger beard outside the pub and pointing at the cage, which was used as a checkpoint during The Troubles to identify people before entering the bar. He leads street art tours of Belfast every Sunday. "This reflects in the city's music — punk is the obvious one — but also art. They're both important."

Adam heads up Seedhead Arts, a Belfast-based street art collective that over the past decade has provided painting opportunities for hundreds of artists worldwide. Their popular Hit the North Festival sees thousands of artists descend on Belfast each May, where they paint murals everywhere from the ends of terraced houses to lampposts, soundtracked by music from artists like David Holmes, a Belfast electronic DJ and producer.

"A decade ago, we were tasked with painting derelict shop shutters on North Street, in an area that had been left to go to ruin by developers," he says, adding that's where the name for the festival came from. "Street art used to paper over the cracks, but now Belfast is a fertile ground for it."

We eventually reach our destination, the Ulster Sports Club music venue. Here, we find a mural of a punk with neon-green spiked hair on the venue's gabled wall, laid back on a sofa and holding a baseball bat in front of a smashed-up TV. 'Alter your native land' is sprayed beside it — lyrics from Stiff Little Fingers' Alternative Ulster punk anthem. "This is how music and art combine in this city," Adam says with a nod.

"I think Northern Ireland understands art more than most places due to our rich mural traditions," he adds, saying that the art is typically inspired by historic events. During The Troubles, street art became even more popular. "Whether it's in the city centre or on one of the peace walls, which still separate unionist and nationalist communities, the writing you see on the walls here is so political."

Later that day, I can't help but gravitate back to Ulster Hall, the city's spiritual home of punk rebellion. But rather than crashing riffs and pogoing punks, my visit is timed with a performance of a different sort. Heading inside, passing the plaques dedicated to Ruby Murray and Rory Gallagher, I take a seat in the auditorium. I'm here to see one of Belfast's other, little-known cultural exports — opera.

Tonight, it's the turn of the 30-strong NI Opera Chorus, with a showcase featuring a snippet from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Each of the performers was selected from open auditions in Belfast. I watch as the full chorus, dressed in black, perform classical works like Mozart's haunting Requiem in D Minor backed by the warming tones of the old pipe organ. Then, soprano Mary McCabe, playing the lead role of Tatyana, floats across the stage in a mauve gown to perform The Letter Scene with soaring vocals, during which she declares her love for the lead, Eugene Onegin.

In this moment, the music is so beautiful that all thought of what lies beyond the historic doors of the Ulster Hall are forgotten — just as they were in the days of Rory Gallagher. All that matters is we're all together, enjoying the performance.