Qualla: Methodist College Belfast

Methodist College Belfast: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Swm12, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 14 April 1932 in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, a 28-year-old Irish physicist named Ernest Walton became one of the first two people in history to artificially split the atomic nucleus. Twenty years later he and his collaborator John Cockcroft won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. Walton had grown up in a Methodist manse, the son of an itinerant preacher, and his schooling - the foundation that took him to Cambridge - was at Methodist College Belfast, the red-brick Victorian school at the foot of the Malone Road. Methody, as everyone in Belfast calls it, was already 65 years old when Walton arrived. It is now 160 years old, has educated three Nobel laureates' worth of distinguished alumni, and the science block named after Walton is still where the chemistry sets live.

Image: Swm12 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Methodist College Belfast: Stones on the Malone Road

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albert Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. The school was conceived in 1844, when the Methodist Conference in Ireland approved the idea of founding their own school in Belfast. Twenty-one more years of fundraising followed. In 1865 they finally laid the foundation stone on a 15-acre site near what would soon be Queen's Un...

Image: Albert Bridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Methodist College Belfast: The Whitla Hall and the Bombs

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir William Whitla was a physician, professor of medicine at Queen's, and one of Methody's longest-serving governors. When he died in 1933 he left £10,000 in his will to build the school whatever it most needed - chapel, library, or hall. The governors chose hall. The Whitla Hall...

Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Methodist College Belfast: The Choir That Sang at Carnegie Hall

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Methody's choirs have been winning national competitions for nearly a century, but the modern peak came in the 2010s. The Chapel Choir has performed at Westminster Abbey, Carnegie Hall in New York, and during Queen Elizabeth II's historic state visit to the Republic of Ireland in...

Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Methodist College Belfast: Walton, Bell, and the Other Famous Names

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebaso, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ernest Walton, who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics, is the most famous of Methody's alumni. The Walton Building on the Methody campus - completed in the early 1990s with its science labs and computer suites - is named after him. But Walton isn't alone in the science wing o...

Image: Sebaso | CC BY-SA 4.0

Methodist College Belfast: Still Here

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Shaw, CC BY-SA 2.0. Methody no longer boards - the final boarding houses closed in 2010, ending a 142-year tradition. Both the original boys' boarding rooms in the Main Building and the McArthur Hall girls' boarding house have been converted into classrooms. The school is now co-educational througho...

Image: Brian Shaw | CC BY-SA 2.0