Things to do in Belfast with kids, ranked

W5 at the Odyssey costs a family of four about £38 and holds a six-year-old for three hours. Titanic Belfast costs the same family close to £72 and, if that six-year-old is typical, loses them somewhere in the third gallery. That is the most useful thing in this guide, and it is the reverse of the order most Belfast itineraries put them in.

Everything below is in Belfast or within about twenty minutes of the City Hall. The Giant’s Causeway is a two-hour round trip with a small child in the back and has its own guide; the Ulster American Folk Park, which turns up on a lot of Belfast lists, is in Omagh, seventy miles west. Prices were checked in August 2026 and are the online rates, which are cheaper than the gate at almost every paid venue here.

1. W5 at the Odyssey

Two hundred and fifty hands-on exhibits over four floors, including Climbit, a four-storey climbing structure, and the Spacebase zone for the under-eights. Adult from £10.95, child from £9.20, under-3s free, a two-adult two-child family ticket from £38.50. The ticket runs all day and you can leave for lunch and come back, which is the detail that makes it good value: most families do two and a half to three hours.

It is ranked first for one reason. It is the only place on this list where a four-year-old and an eleven-year-old are both busy at the same time, without one of them being dragged around after the other.

Pre-booking is essential and last admission is two hours before closing, so a 4.30pm arrival is a wasted fare. On a wet Saturday in the school holidays it is loud and full, which is a reason to take an opening slot rather than an afternoon one. W5 also runs quieter sessions for children who would find the noise hard.

2. Titanic Belfast

£24.95 adult and £11 child online, £26.95 and £13 if you walk up, and the ticket includes the SS Nomadic tied up outside. It is the best-made attraction in the city: the Shipyard Ride carries you through a reconstructed gantry, and the launch and fit-out galleries are genuinely well done.

The honest caveat is age. The opening galleries are text, film and model-heavy, and children under about seven go flat until the ride. Nine and up is where this earns its price.

If you are going anyway, the Early Riser ticket is online-only from April to October at £19.95 adult and £9.50 child, and it saves a family of four roughly £22 while putting you in the galleries ahead of the coach parties. There is also a guided outdoor Discovery Tour at £20 and £13, which is much better in dry weather than in horizontal rain off the Lough.

3. Ulster Transport Museum, Cultra

Twenty minutes out the Bangor road, or the train to Cultra, and the best wet-weather building in greater Belfast. Adult £12.50, child (5 to 17) £7.80, under-5s free, family of four £30.75. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, closed Mondays. Rail gallery, road gallery, a Titanic exhibition and a DeLorean, and enough scale that children can be let loose in it.

One thing to know before you drive out. The Ulster Folk Museum is directly across the road and is now a separate ticket – the combined dual ticket no longer exists. Families find that out in the car park most days of the week.

The folk museum is the better idea on a dry day, when it works as an open-air village to walk around. Several of its buildings are currently closed for maintenance, including the Meeting Street houses, the national school, the corn mill and the flax mill, so if the point of the trip is the reconstructed street, check what is open first. On a wet day, take the transport museum and skip the walk.

4. Belfast Zoo

Built up the side of Cave Hill, which is both the appeal and the problem. Online: adult £15, child (4 to 16) £7.50, under-4s free, family day ticket for two adults and three children £44.50. Gate prices are a pound more per head. Summer hours are 10am to 6pm with last entry at 4.30pm; from late September it is 10am to 4pm with last entry at 2.30pm. It closes two days a year, 25 and 26 December. Five per cent of the ticket goes to conservation work.

Nobody warns you about the walk back. The site climbs steadily and the return leg to the car park comes at the end of the day when the smallest child has stopped walking. If you are pushing a buggy, take the descent slowly and plan to be carrying somebody.

5. Streamvale Open Farm

A working dairy farm on the Ballyhanwood Road in east Belfast, fifteen minutes from the centre, open daily 10.30am to 5pm all year with last admission at 4pm. Adult £11.50, child (3 to 17) £11, toddler (1 to 2) £3.50, under-1s free. Family of four £42, five £51.50, six £61.

Hands-on is the whole point: feeding, tractor rides, barrel rides. The pricing quirk worth knowing is that adults pay essentially the same as children, and a family ticket is priced by headcount rather than by age, so two adults bringing one toddler pay near enough the full family rate. Two children up makes it good value; one small child does not.

6. Ulster Museum

Free, and inside the Botanic Gardens, which means the playground and the Tropical Ravine are a two-minute walk from the front door. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, closed Mondays.

The draw for children is Takabuti, the Egyptian mummy who arrived in Belfast in 1834 and has been one of its most-visited objects ever since, and the natural sciences floor above her. One straight warning: The Troubles and Beyond gallery is not a children’s exhibit and does not pretend to be. It is worth an older teenager’s time and nobody else’s.

It is sixth rather than second because it is free and good, not because it is a full day. Ninety minutes is honest, which is why the Botanic Gardens next door matter – the parks open at 7.30am and Botanic closes at 9pm, and the Palm House and Tropical Ravine cost nothing either.

7. Colin Glen

Colin Glen runs up a wooded valley in west Belfast under the Belfast Hills, and holds Ireland’s first alpine coaster, the Black Bull Run, along with a high-ropes course, a climbing wall and a long zipline. The numbers that decide whether the trip works:

• Alpine coaster: from age three, but three- to seven-year-olds must share a cart with an adult. Solo riders need to be eight, or 1.3m tall. Tickets give two runs.
• High ropes: minimum age ten and minimum height 1.4m. Climbing wall and low ropes: 1m.
• Maximum 120kg per cart, and every under-18 needs a supervising adult on site throughout.

The Gruffalo Trail here is the only official one in Ireland, and it is a paid guided walk that ends with a Julia Donaldson book, a sticker and a certificate. It is not a free woodland trail you can wander at will, which is what a lot of people arrive expecting.

Colin Glen is the best adrenaline on the list. It is also priced activity by activity, and a family can go through £100 without trying.

8. Mo Mowlam Play Park, Stormont

Free, and the best playground in Northern Ireland by a distance. Six zones and over forty pieces of equipment: two 30-metre cableways, a 10.6-metre pyramid tower with a wavy slide off it, a castle-themed section, wheelchair-accessible swings and roundabouts, a multi-sensory area for younger children with sensory needs, and a separate toddler enclosure with its own slides and climbing walls.

Open 9.30am to 8.30pm daily, shortening with the daylight. There is a Quiet Hour on Sundays from 9.30 to 10.30am for children with additional needs, toilets with changing facilities, and a refreshment kiosk.

Park in the right place. The car park is on the left about 100 metres inside the main gate of the Stormont Estate, not up at Parliament Buildings, which is where the road pulls you and where you will then walk back down the hill.

It is eighth and not first because it is a playground. Two hours, then you need a second plan.

9. Dundonald International Ice Bowl

The only public Olympic-size ice rink in Northern Ireland, plus tenpin bowling and Indiana Land soft play under the same roof, twenty minutes east of the centre. Skating is £10 standard, £6 for juniors of four and under, £32 for a family of four and £38 for five, and skate hire is included in every one of those prices. Indiana Land is £5.50 for four- to eleven-year-olds and £4.50 for three and under, with non-walkers free alongside a paying child; there is an eleven-and-under age limit and a 5ft height limit, and the free-fall slide is six and up.

Two warnings. Tickets cannot be transferred, amended or refunded once bought, so pick the session carefully. And a rink is cold in a way that four-year-olds are vocal about after twenty minutes – bring gloves, which they will also need if they fall.

10. Cave Hill and Belfast Castle

Free, and the best thing to do in Belfast on a clear afternoon. The adventurous playground below Belfast Castle is built for three- to fourteen-year-olds and has swings, slides, a climbing net and an aerial runway, and the castle gardens hide nine cats for children to find.

The full Cavehill Trail is a different proposition: 7.2km circular with 256m of ascent, and it wants a decent level of fitness rather than enthusiasm. McArt’s Fort at the top stands 368m above the city, and the profile below it, the one Belfast calls Napoleon’s Nose, is thought to have given Jonathan Swift his sleeping giant in Gulliver’s Travels. With small children, do the playground, walk up to the castle terrace for the view down Belfast Lough, and leave Cave Hill proper for a decade or so.

When it rains

It will. Ranked by how long each one actually lasts:

1. W5 – three hours, and you can break for lunch and return on the same ticket.
2. Ulster Transport Museum – two hours, and £30.75 for a family of four.
3. Dundonald Ice Bowl – two hours plus lunch if you pair skating with Indiana Land.
4. Andersonstown Leisure Centre aqua park – one session. Three slides (the Abyss drop slide, the Torrent master blaster and the Vortex body slide), an indoor surf simulator, and an Aqua Play zone for under-12s with a tipping bucket and water cannons. Family sessions need booking ahead.
5. Ulster Museum – ninety minutes, and free, which is the right answer when the day has already cost money.

There is also indoor skydiving and a Ninja Master Course at We Are Vertigo in the Titanic Quarter, where the wind tunnel takes children from four, and Lost City Adventure Golf, which runs two indoor jungle courses at the Odyssey and a second site at Cityside Retail Park with free parking.

What not to do in the rain: Belfast Zoo, Colin Glen, and anything involving the Cave Hill trails.

With a toddler

Streamvale, where a one- or two-year-old is £3.50 and the animals are at their eye level. Mo Mowlam, which has its own toddler zone with small slides and swings, well away from the cableways. The Botanic Gardens playground. W5, where under-3s are free and Spacebase is built for them.

And one thing to get right before you book. The inflatable aqua park at Let’s Go Hydro in Carryduff – the one in most of the photographs of Belfast family days out – is 7+, 110cm minimum, and requires 50m of unassisted swimming. Children of eight and under need an adult in the water with them, at one adult to three children. Younger children go to Puddle Park instead, which is aimed at ages one to eight. Book the aqua park for a five-year-old and you will be turned away at the gate.

With a teenager

Crumlin Road Gaol is the strongest thing in the city for this age. The self-guided experience runs on audio, video and holograms through the wings, the condemned cell and the tunnel under the road, takes 60 to 90 minutes, and opens 10am to 4pm daily. Adult £18.50, child £12, family of two adults and two children £55. It covers executions and the Troubles honestly, and it is not for small children.

HMS Caroline in Alexandra Dock is the last floating survivor of the Battle of Jutland and reopened after a long refit. Adult £11, child (5 to 15) £9, under-5s free, and the ticket is valid for a year. Guided tours run Friday to Sunday every 45 minutes from 10am, last tour 3.15pm; during Northern Ireland school holidays it opens Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4.30pm, for self-guided visits.

Beyond those: the Colin Glen high ropes and zipline (ten and up, 1.4m), and We Are Vertigo’s Ninja Master Course.

Free things to do

• Mo Mowlam play park, Stormont Estate. The best of them.
• Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens. Closed Mondays.
• Cave Hill adventurous playground and the Belfast Castle grounds, including the cat hunt.
• Botanic Gardens, the Palm House and the Tropical Ravine.
• St George’s Market – Friday 8am to 2pm, Saturday 9am to 3pm, Sunday 10am to 3pm, free to walk in, live music at the weekend and a water refill station at the East Bridge Street entrance.
• Belfast City Hall tours and the Titanic Memorial Garden.
• The Big Fish on Donegall Quay. A 10-metre ceramic salmon whose blue scales are hundreds of printed tiles carrying fragments of the city’s history, standing at the mouth of the Farset – Béal feirste, the spot Belfast is named after. Children will spend a genuine twenty minutes hunting the tiles with pictures on them.
• Northern Ireland War Memorial Museum, Talbot Street. Small, free, family activities on Saturdays.

Walkable from the city centre

Walking times from Donegall Square, outside the City Hall:

The rest of the list

Everything else worth knowing about, with what it costs.

Practical notes

Money. North of the border it is pounds sterling. Every paid attraction above quotes in £, and euro is of little use in Belfast.

Booking. W5, Streamvale and the Ice Bowl all ask you to pre-book, and W5 means it. Belfast Zoo and Titanic Belfast are both cheaper online than at the gate, by a pound a head at the zoo and two at Titanic Belfast.

Parking. The city centre is pay-and-display. Titanic Quarter, the Ice Bowl, Streamvale, Colin Glen and Cave Hill all have their own car parks, and the Stormont one is free.

Closed Mondays. The Ulster Museum, the Ulster Transport Museum and the Ulster Folk Museum all shut on Mondays, which removes two of the ten above and the best free indoor hour in the city. W5, the zoo, Streamvale, Colin Glen and the Ice Bowl are all open.

If you have one afternoon, it is raining, and it happens to be a weekend, eat in St George’s Market and book W5 for 1pm. That is the whole plan.