Three great Belfast city tours to book now
No nationality talks as continuously and as comedically as the Irish, so it's unsurprising that this new course of tourism is thriving. Even the locals are in on them, saying the walkabouts have made them see modern Belfast in 'colour' after the 'black and white' of their childhoods. Here are three of the best.
Ireland is home to some of the world's finest seafood — and people reluctant to put it in their mouths. So says Rae Carnegie, a guide on one of Belfast's most colourful food tours.
St George's Market is the centrepiece of Carnegie's four-hour whistle-stop tour. Trading since 1890, largely in butter, it now sells everything from shark meat (sold out) and oysters to antique hairbrushes and Irish macaroons (aka fifteens), as well as 'No Topless Bathing, Ulster Has Suffered Enough' art. 'You're going to be punched in the face by your senses,' Carnegie says. She isn't wrong.
'Our eels get sent to Japan,' Carnegie laments, before clapping her hands. 'I've got sweets for indigestion, pills if you're hungover, plasters if your feet hurt,' she shouts, marching off through the market for 'tea, not chai, not matcha, not whatever the hell the kids are drinking now, just normal Irish tea'.
Did you know 'bap' stands for 'bread against poverty'? It's just one of many historical titbits on the seven-stop tour, whose standouts are Mike's Fancy Cheese, and Daisies, run by the chocolatier Martin Giles, who attends boxing matches with pockets full of liqueur bonbons so he doesn't have to queue at the bar. Word to the wise: buy his hot-chocolate powder. 'Make sure you mix it with milk, not water, though,' Carnegie warns, 'otherwise Martin turns into Liam Neeson from Taken. He will find you.' Details £70, tasteandtour.co.uk
• How to spend a weekend in Belfast and the Antrim Coast
Dolores Vischer is a punk, 'not a posh punk' — and while she once played the drums with the Stranglers, that was only because Jet Black needed a pee. 'New York had the haircuts, London had the trousers and Belfast had the reason for punk,' she says, leading us around the city's iconic musical landmarks, playing music through a speaker dangling from her lanyard.
Not for nothing is Belfast a Unesco City of Music (Liverpool and Glasgow are the UK's only other two). The city spawned Van Morrison, Stiff Little Fingers and, most recently and notoriously, the headline-grabbing hip-hoppers Kneecap. Kicking off at the Ulster Hall, where Led Zeppelin first performed Stairway to Heaven, the two-hour tour visits the city's oldest pub, oldest church, trad music pubs, record shops and a Victorian music hall, as well some of the city's best street art.Details From £22, creativetoursbelfast.com
Who knows a city better than a taxi driver? Plus, this tour with yer man Billy Scott — boy about town, biker, comedian, historian, sponge of local gossip, with many a contact up his sleeve — comes with a proper black cab. We whizz like slebs down bus lanes, stopping where we like because, after all, this is a loiter-legal taxi. Genius.
We tour the student areas, central Belfast, the Cathedral Quarter with its soon-to-be-married stags, and many a backstreet shooting spot as Scott rattles through IRA history and the Troubles, trailing facts in his wake: 'Queen's University, Tudor-style, opened 1857; women were allowed to attend in hats and gloves and CS Lewis's mother was one of the first female graduates.' We pull over so I can sign the Peace Wall, and pull up one backstreet, not far from Sinn Fein HQ, where a mural of Kneecap looms huge and alive. A moment in history indeed.
'Nice spot you're staying in,' Billy says of the Harrison Chambers of Distinction, in south Belfast (B&B doubles from £130, chambersofdistinction.com), whose owner, Melanie Harrison, designed the fabulously bohemian suites herself and has enough stories to run her own tour. 'It reminds me of a 19th-century Parisian gentlemen's club,' Scott says. 'Not that I've ever been in one.'Details £80 for two, £35 a head for three or more, touringaroundbelfast.com
Lucy Holden was a guest of tourismireland.com. Fly to Belfast from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen or Inverness from £30 return with easyJet, Aer Lingus or Loganair
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