Belfast has a wonderful array of fascinating, varied and beautiful doorways, which can tell us so much about the city's history and also provide great visual enjoyment.
With that in mind, people are being invited to discover the fascinating stories behind Belfast’s doorways during this year’s European Heritage Open Days (EHOD) weekend on Saturday and Sunday, September 10-11.
Ulster Architectural Heritage (UAH) has also designed an accompanying book, featuring photographs of 30 celebrated doors from across the city, all of which have been taken on a mobile phone.
Read more: See inside Ulster University Belfast campus
The publication is filled with facts, history and information on Belfast city centre’s architectural history.
Ahead of this weekend's event, we explore the history behind ten of the city's most famous doorways.
The Ocean Buildings, Donegall Square East/Chichester St (1902)
This striking, ecclesiastical-looking corner doorway, approached by semi-circular steps, provides the main entrance to a fantastical Perpendicular Gothic (or Tudoresque) five-storey building built of glowing red Ballochmoyle sandstone.
It was designed by Young & Mackenzie Architects for the Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corporation and boasts a lively roofline and lovely stone carvings by James Edgar Winter, including naturalistic details, heads, shields, and mermaids and lighthouses, which formed the Corporation’s trademark.
Beneath the ground floor of the building, the basement housed Ireland’s first safe deposit secure vaults (built by Ratner Safe Co. of London).
Of special interest, above the main doorway, a richly carved oriel window is ‘held up’, as it were, by carved heads of King Edward VII (in the centre) and Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra (on either side of him), adding the evocative embodiment of empire to the building’s symbolism.
Only one side of the panelled oak doors actually opens – the double door presentation is a conceit as one half hides part of the building’s iron-frame construction.
A quirky surviving architect’s drawing of the entrance alludes to this depicting a top-hatted, high-collared Edwardian gent surveying the scene from in front of one open half of the doorway.
The building later also became known as Pearl Assurance House, reflecting a change of company headquarters; it has contained a variety of office and retail spaces over many years and is currently being refurbished.
With the exception of the ground-floor insurance company offices, it was for a time after 1922 home to the Northern Ireland Government’s Ministry of Home Affairs.
2 Royal Avenue, Former Provincial Bank of Ireland (1864-9)
A splendid entrance to a splendid former bank, designed by the High Victorian architect WJ Barre (1830-1867), completed just after his untimely death and with less decorative sculpture to the pediment and roof than he intended.
Nonetheless, the façade and entrance are very imposing, suitable to a bank’s self-confident display in the centre of the bustling city.
The building is of Cookstown sandstone and is a Romanesque/Neo-Palladian palazzo, with clustered columns and a wealth of carved heads of Irish soldiers and ancient kings in the spandrels and a trio of large doors.
It was originally designed to front on to Hercules Place and is the only building in Royal Avenue surviving from that period before the grand boulevard was created in the 1880s.
The interior of the building is an extraordinary sight, lit by a circular glass dome and with a host of quirky sculptural figures, it is one of the best and most surprising interiors in Belfast.
After it ceased to be a bank, for many years it had a new lease of life as a supermarket and currently, now in the ownership of Belfast City Council, it is a cultural and performance space.
Barre also designed the Albert Clock, the Ulster Hall and the warehouse at 18 Bedford Street.
Former Bank of Ireland, 92-100 Royal Avenue (1930)
This Art Deco, steel-frame building by JV Downes of McDonnell & Dixon of Dublin in white Portland stone cladding with a tiered clock tower topped off with a copper dome on a canted corner to North Street forms a memorable conclusion to the Royal Avenue vista and a restrained modernist counterpoint to the flamboyant NeoBaroque City Hall whose materials it nonetheless echoes.
The bank also forms a good vista conclusion to Lower North Street. With something of an American feel to it, with its emphasis on vertical lines, it speaks of economic growth and investment in the architectural language of its time.
The entrance on the chamfered corner is composed of five steps reaching a stylish Art Deco metal and glass double door with a fanlight.
Above the door ‘Bank of Ireland’ is displayed in original lettering and above it is a shallow relief of a stylised female head of Medusa (note the snakes).
In Classical architecture Medusa head reliefs were placed above entrances to protect against evil; however, the allusion here may be to the watermark of Bank of Ireland five, ten and twenty pound notes.
Closed in 2005, the building is now owned by the City Council and being put to new visitor purposes.
St Mary’s, Chapel Lane (1868)
Behind Royal Avenue, facing on to Bank Square within a dense network of streets, the redbrick St Mary’s Chapel gives Chapel Lane its name.
It possesses an interesting entrance with two low doors set within a semi-circular arch. Note the Maltese cross above the arch and the Celtic decoration within the arch and incorporated into the foliage of the squat capitals to the five colonettes.
Within the tympanum above the twin portal is a sculpture of the Blessed Virgin Mary set within a ‘mandorla’, with an angel either side, one bearing a cross and the other a crown.
The building of 1868 by John O’Neill incorporates the walls of an earlier chapel of 1783 (and also has a later apse by Padraig Gregory of 1940-41) and includes black-brick string banding and an eight-spoke cartwheel window set within a double ring of red and black brick banding and two square-plan small towers.
Substantial contributions to the cost of the building were made by Protestants and some have alluded to the double entrance being akin to Presbyterians’ predilection for double-door entrances; it is notable that there are no steps so that people can walk in easily off the street.
An Italianate grotto dating from the 1950s is situated beside the church.
Murray House, Murray Street (1910)
The entrance to the former Glendinning McLeish & Co. Ltd is a magnificent doorway tucked down the end of this short cul-de-sac.
The L-shaped building by James A. Hanna (father of the well-respected architect Denis O’D. Hanna) is in red brick with an ashlar sandstone ground floor and dressings.
The doorway has an Art Nouveau flair – wavy-topped set in a semicircle of leaded lights with a Gibbsian surround and surmounted by another wavy pediment containing the date – 1910 – in a field of carved shamrocks and monograms.
The firm’s name is displayed in the mosaic in the pavement in front of the door. Look up, and spot the stumpy-columned windows at fourth-floor level and square end turrets with elongated porthole features.
The Old Museum Building, 7 College Square North (1831)
This was the first museum building in Ireland to be erected by voluntary subscription. It was built by the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society who played a major public and educational role in the culture of Belfast and who still own it but the collections which BNHPS amassed over the Victorian period were later gifted (in 1910) to the forerunner of what is now the Ulster Museum.
It was in this building that the famous Egyptian mummy Takabuti was unrolled, examined and displayed – in the atmospheric galleried top-floor exhibition room.
The building was designed by Thomas Duff (of Newry) and Thomas Jackson (of Belfast) and is an elegant three-storey Greek Revival structure with a central pediment on giant order pilasters embodying in style and function the spirit of the new Enlightenment.
The ground floor is rusticated and sports round-headed windows and was said to be based on the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus (on the south face of the Acropolis, which was recorded in The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett of 1789), with Duff and Jackson copying the row of laurel wreaths ornamenting the string course below the first floor windows from that pattern book.
The portico is a copy of the doorway at the Horologion of Andronikos Kyrristos (aka the Tower of the Winds and again recorded by Stuart and Revett and widely imitated in the late 18th century – as at Mount Stewart).
The fluted columns stand on a staircase, with acanthus capitals and responding pilasters on the face of the building; the row of dentils beneath the cornice, all derive from that source, though the pediment on the Athens doorcase has been transposed to the top of the overall building.
Note the fine double-door with its ten square panels and the rectangular fanlight above with decoratively arranged glass, and, either side of the steps the conical stone formations relocated from the Giant’s Causeway.
Over the 20th Century various tenants occupied the building, including the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA) and the Ulster Academy of Arts.
The predecessor of the MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre), the Old Museum Arts Centre, was based here until it opened its new premises in St Anne’s Square.
It suffered considerable damage at various times including during ‘the Troubles’, and the iron gates and railings, which had been removed during the Second World War are recent replacements.
The building is currently the base for Ulster Architectural Heritage as well as a youth arts group and the BNHPS.
Murphy & Stevenson, 40 Linenhall Street (1902)
Don’t miss the bold detailing above the central doorway of this former turn-of-the-century warehouse, designed by Young & Mackenzie for linen and handkerchief manufacturers, Murphy & Stevenson.
The red sandstone entrance to a robust six-storey, fourteen-bay Belfast redbrick warehouse for a firm whose factory was in Dromore, Co. Down, speaks of ambition in the industrialised city.
The feature doorway has rusticated sandstone pilasters (echoing the rusticated sandstone ground-floor base of the building), a round-headed archway with a central keystone carved female head, and, above, an emphatic cornice incorporating a stone with the initials of the firm, M&S, a pierced parapet in front of a semi-circular window and two attached obelisk features set on balls.
The other striking feature is the treatment of the pilaster capitals: two lions heads with linen swags underneath frame the doorway composition and the keystone head in a protective fashion; the Northern Whig newspaper in 1902 referred to the head as emblematic of ‘our staple industry’ – presumably linen.
Notice also on the scalloped roofline the circular turrets of the building.
Side entrance, former Presbyterian War Memorial Hostel, Brunswick Street (1926)
Here’s a nice curiosity. The Presbyterian War Memorial Hostel on Howard Street and Brunswick Street was designed by Young & Mackenzie as a large hostel with 250 bedrooms.
It is of steel frame construction with red Ballochmoyle sandstone cladding and has something of an American downtown air, perhaps reflecting the influence of James Reid Young’s training in New York before the First World War.
The style is simple, vaguely Art Deco, and there was originally a roof garden on the flat roof.
The side entrance on Brunswick Street includes a low relief ‘burning bush’, which is the symbol of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland within a rectangle above the double door while there is restrained decoration around the frame and thin side windows.
Note at the base of the doorway, still just visible, the foundation stones bearing the name of the Architects.
Former Swanston & Bones Warehouse, Queen Street/College Street (1890)
Here is a doorway gem from the High Victorian period, turning the corner of two streets at the base of a semi-circular tower topped off by conical turret.
Now only the façade of the building has been retained and new student accommodation has been built behind and above; however, this was built for William Swanston as a four-storey warehouse, with stone used at ground-floor level and red brick above, and designed by the prolific practice of Young & Mackenzie.
The doorway (double-doors, now imaginatively painted) contains sculptural detail of nice wit and ingenuity and great delicacy: the head on the keystone depicts Sir Arthur Chichester, so closely associated with the foundations of Belfast as a town, wearing a deep ruffle of the 17th century which neatly alludes to the collar-and-cuff making purpose of the Swanston & Bones business while putting the building in the city’s historic context.
Amidst sculpted foliage (including rose, shamrock, thistle and oak), there are also carved coats of arms of Belfast and Ulster in the spandrels.
The retention of this fine doorway owes much to campaigning. The UAHS took two successful judicial reviews to establish the principle that an unlisted building in a conservation area, which contributes to its character should not be replaced by a new building for merely economic reasons and the policy presumption should be in favour of retaining the building.
No.199 Donegall Street – St Patrick’s Presbytery (c.1820, brass door 1952)
This three-storey redbrick terrace of houses offers a glimpse of Georgian old Belfast and No.199 is the Presbytery to St Patrick’s Church next door.
It sports a magnificent highly polished brass door with a roundheaded fanlight above the lintel and supporting white-painted Ionic columns.
The house was originally a Bishop’s Palace for Bishop William Crolly appointed Bishop of Down and Connor in 1825 and the original front door is now on the side of the house facing the church.
The house claims to be the oldest continuous inhabitancy in the city of Belfast.
The brass door bears bullet and shrapnel marks from the Troubles; it was clad in brass in 1952 and repaired and fully refurbished in 2020.
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