Long before the cultural quarter, this was the merchant quarter - the engine room of Victorian Belfast, where the linen and shipbuilding fortunes were counted. Waring Street and Hill Street and Donegall Street were lined with warehouses, brokerages, and the offices of newspapers that printed in five editions a day. The Northern Whig satirised the city's worthies the way Punch did London's. The Belfast News Letter, the oldest English-language newspaper in continuous publication anywhere in the world, ran its presses out of Donegall Street. Then the 20th century arrived. Linen collapsed. The shipyard contracted. The Troubles emptied the streets after dark, and the warehouses emptied during the day. By the 1980s the quarter was mostly listed buildings, mostly boarded, mostly waiting.

If anything kept the area alive through the worst years, it was loud and angry and refused to behave. North Street and its neighbouring lanes became the nucleus of Belfast punk in the late 1970s, a scene that produced bands like Stiff Little Fingers and a record label that mattered - Good Vibrations, run by Terri Hooley from a shop called Cathedral Records inside the North Street Arcade. Hooley sold records to teenagers who walked past army patrols to reach him. The Undertones came down from Derry to play the student union at the University of Ulster's nearby Conor Hall. Then in 2004 the Arcade burned down in a fire that locals still describe as suspicious, taking the shop and most of the surviving street with it. That fire became part of the quarter's mythology - the arsonist that gentrification needed.

Step out of the cobbled lanes and you arrive at Custom House Square, an open plaza in front of the city's old Custom House on the Lagan bank. In the 19th century this was Belfast's Speakers' Corner, where anyone with an idea and a packing crate could gather a crowd: socialists, evangelicals, suffragists, Home Rulers and Unionists shouted across the same pavement. Reopened as a public square in 2004 after years of council redesign, it now hosts the closing concerts of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival each May, the Open House traditional music festival in autumn, and circus shows for children in summer. The same air that once carried sermons now carries amplified fiddle music. Different stage, same instinct.

The cultural rebirth needed an anchor, and it got one in 2012. The Metropolitan Arts Centre, known almost universally as The MAC, opened on the site of a Talbot Street car park after a RIBA-managed design competition. Hackett Hall McKnight Architects produced a brick-clad cube that won the Royal Institute of British Architects' Downes Medal, an RIBA National Award, and a nomination for the European Union's Mies van der Rohe Award. Around it sprouted the supporting infrastructure of a real arts district: the Black Box performance venue, the Oh Yeah Music Centre, Belfast Exposed photography gallery, the Belfast Community Circus School, an annual film festival. The Muddlers Club restaurant earned a Michelin star on Warehouse Lane, named for the secret society of United Irishmen who met in a tavern on this very spot in the 1790s.

Walk through the quarter today and the layers are visible. Cobbles from the 1860s. A pub - The John Hewitt - named after one of Belfast's great socialist poets and run as a cooperative. The Northern Whig building, now a restaurant, its old presses long gone. The Assembly Rooms on Waring Street, dating to 1769, where Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen once met and where Bunting transcribed the harp music of itinerant Irish musicians at a famous 1792 gathering. St Anne's Cathedral itself, begun in 1899 and finished slowly over a century, still anchors the streetscape with the slender stainless-steel Spire of Hope rising from its roof. The quarter is, in the end, a small place - you can walk across it in fifteen minutes. But for a city that spent decades being defined by what tore it apart, the Cathedral Quarter has become a small, stubborn argument for what brings it together.