Protrait of an Industrial City: 'Clanging Belfas' 1750-1914

Description

Hammers clanging' was the sound that the great nineteenth-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray associated with Belfast when he visited it in 1842. By then, Belfast's industrial development was well under way. Had Thackeray visited the city in 1900, he would not have been surprised to find that it was by then the fastest-growing city in the British Isles. It had outstripped Dublin as the largest on the island of Ireland; indeed, it ranked third in the British empire ... and still echoed to the sound of those clanging hammers. Industry lay at the heart of the city's manufacturing prowess. The shipyards dominated the central harbour area. The textile mills