Look North Festival

The North Belfast Festival

North Belfast has a vibrant and diverse community with a rich cultural history and unique heritage and built environment. In just over one mile, there are fifteen historic buildings and sites which sit side by side collectively telling a fascinating story of the city’s past. This area of Belfast was also the cultural roots and creative influences of many celebrated literary talents such as; John Hewitt, Padraic Fiacc, Ciaran Carson, Brian Moore, Helen Waddell, Frank Ormsby, Anne Devlin, Gerald Dawe, Bernard Mac Laverty and Anna Burns.

North Belfast is also infamously home to the oldest residential community in Belfast “Sailortown,” which was a working-class dockland community in the docks area of Belfast. Established in the mid-19th century on partly reclaimed land, it had a mixed Protestant and Catholic population who regularly greeted visiting sailors from many European nations (in particular those bordering the Baltic Sea) and from even as far away as India and China. At one time over 5,000 people lived in the small, cobblestoned streets of red-brick terraced houses packed between the docks and York Street. The gradual demolition of this community began in the late 1960s to construct the M2 motorway when the population was largely dispersed and rehoused in communities further out of town. Only four of the original residential properties are still in existence.