‘”Like an Old Cathedral City”: Belfast Welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849’,

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The queen's visit, however, reveals a community characterized by much the same mixture of civic pride and diffidence that characterized other provincial centres. The episode also casts light on the ambivalent attitude of the British and Irish political establishments to the new industrial town, and on Belfast's ambiguous position within the Irish urban hierarchy.