The Lanyon Building
The front you see from University Road is the whole reason to make a special trip. Sir Charles Lanyon designed it in red brick and sandstone in the Tudor Gothic style, opened in 1849, with a central tower loosely borrowed from the Founder’s Tower at Magdalen College, Oxford. You can walk into the quadrangle and look freely; the Great Hall and Council Chamber inside are open on the guided tours. Look for the marble statue of Galileo by Pio Fedi in the entrance hall, and the portraits of Queen Victoria and Seamus Heaney in the Great Hall.
If you have an hour, the building and the lawn in front of it are the visit. Everything else here is a bonus you can fold into a walk to the Botanic Gardens next door.
History
The university grew out of the Belfast Academical Institution of 1810 and took a royal charter in 1845 as Queen’s College, Belfast, a non-denominational counterpart to Trinity College in Dublin. It became the independent Queen’s University of Belfast in 1908 and joined the Russell Group in 2006. The campus filled out over the 20th century with the Great Hall, the old Lynn library of 1868 and the McClay Library in 2009. The poet Philip Larkin worked in the library here in the early 1950s; his blue plaque is on the Old Library, one of several across the grounds.
What to see
The Naughton Gallery, up in the Lanyon Building, shows rotating contemporary exhibitions and dips into the university’s own collection. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm, free. The Queen’s Welcome Centre on University Road doubles as a tourist information desk and shop, open Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm, and is where you book or join a tour. The McClay Library, with its glass atrium and quiet reading rooms, is open to the public during library hours.
The Botanic Gardens sit immediately south of the campus, with the Victorian Palm House and the Tropical Ravine, and the free Ulster Museum stands inside the gardens. Together they make an easy afternoon without a car or a ticket.
Guided tours
Free campus tours run on Mondays and Fridays at 10am, noon and 2pm, led by student ambassadors. They must be booked in advance, in person at the Welcome Centre or through the university’s visitor page. The tours are the only way into the Great Hall and Council Chamber, so they are worth timing your visit around if those interest you.
Research worth knowing
Queen’s is the bigger research engine of the two Northern Ireland universities, and one strand has a visitor angle. In 2020 a team led by Dr Mike Simms identified two Jurassic dinosaur bone fragments from Islandmagee in County Antrim – the only dinosaur fossils ever confirmed from Irish rock. One belonged to a plant-eating Scelidosaurus, the other to a theropod close to Sarcosaurus; both were modelled in 3D at Queen’s and the work was published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. The bones are due to go on display at the Ulster Museum.
Getting there
Botanic Station is a 5 to 10 minute walk away and connects to the wider rail network; Belfast Lanyon Place Station is about 25 minutes on foot. Metro routes 8A, 8B and 8C run frequently down University Road from the city centre.
On-campus parking is for permit holders only during the day. There is pay-and-display on the surrounding streets, around University Square and College Green, but spaces go quickly, so the train or bus is the easier call.
Nearby
- Belfast Botanic Gardens – next to the campus, with the Palm House and Tropical Ravine.
- Ulster Museum – inside the gardens, free, with art, history and natural-science galleries.
- Queen’s Film Theatre – a two-screen independent cinema on University Square, showing international and arthouse films.