The grandest thing on Bedford Street, Ulster Hall, opened in 1862 as a ballroom with space left for an organ, and it has been Belfast’s main concert room ever since. The Rolling Stones played here in 1965. That is the short version of why you’d come: not to wander the street, which is a working office thoroughfare running from the rear of Belfast City Hall down to the start of the Golden Mile, but to see a hall, eat well, or sleep in what is now the city’s tallest hotel. If you have time for one thing, time it to a gig at the Ulster Hall.
The linen warehouses
The street appears on Mason’s 1815 plan as Bishop Street and was renamed Bedford Street by the Town Council in April 1851. Whom it honours is genuinely uncertain: a Duke of Bedford is the usual guess, but the Franklin Street running off it points just as plausibly to a Sir William Franklin, and no record settles it.
What is certain is what the street became. The whole Linen Quarter was a marshy flood plain of the Blackstaff River until it was drained from the 1830s on, and through the 1850s the new grid filled with the brick-and-sandstone warehouses that earned Belfast its nickname, ‘Linenopolis’. Several still stand. Opposite the Ulster Hall at No. 17 is Ewart’s Warehouse, the former Bedford Street Weaving Factory, a three-storey block of warm brown sandstone built in a Venetian style by the Glasgow architect James Hamilton. Bryson House (1867), the work of Belfast’s own William J. Barre, went up as another linen warehouse and now holds offices behind its sandstone-trimmed red brick.
Ulster Hall
Barre designed the Ulster Hall too (34 Bedford Street), and it opened on 12 May 1862, built by the Ulster Hall Company on the site of an old spinning factory as a multi-purpose room grand enough for its great organ. A century and a half on it still runs as a concert and event hall, and it’s the starting point for the Belfast Music Walking Tour, which trades on the city’s UNESCO City of Music title. If there’s anything on while you’re in town, this is the building to check.
The Grand Central and the street today
The Grand Central Hotel (9–15 Bedford Street) is Belfast’s tallest hotel, and its top-floor Observatory Bar is the highest public vantage point in the city, looking out over the rooftops towards Belfast Lough and the Belfast Hills. It stands on a pointed piece of the street’s harder history: this is the site of Windsor House, wrecked by a bomb in 1992, bought by the Hastings group in 2015 and rebuilt as the hotel.
For food, the street runs from chains to pub grub: Nando’s and PizzaExpress (both roughly 11.30am to 10pm), Pug Uglys at No. 21, and the Grand Café on the ground floor of the hotel (7am to 10pm). The Container Kitchen and Flaxx Boardwalk work as casual food-court spaces with rotating vendors. Weekdays bring office crowds at lunch; weekends are quieter if you want the street to yourself.
Getting there
Bedford Street is an easy walk from City Hall and the centre. Ulsterbus and Metro services stop on Donegall Square West and Dublin Road. Driving in, the nearest long-stay parking is the NCP on Great Victoria Street, about five minutes on foot; on-street spaces are few and fill on weekday mornings. The pavements are level and wheelchair-friendly, and the street itself costs nothing — it’s the concerts, rooms and dinners that you pay for. For more in the immediate area, see the Belfast City Centre guide.