Qualla: Queen's University Belfast

Queen's University Belfast: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NTF30, CC BY-SA 4.0. The most photographed building in Belfast is not a cathedral or a bank or a town hall. It is the Lanyon Building, the original 1849 quad of Queen's University Belfast, designed by Sir Charles Lanyon in red brick and pale Caen stone with Tudor Gothic crenellations modelled on Magdalen College, Oxford. The architecture is borrowed. The institution it houses is not. Queen's was conceived in 1845 as one of three colleges of the Queen's University of Ireland, an explicit attempt by Sir Robert Peel's government to create non-denominational higher education in Ireland - Catholic and Protestant students in the same lecture theatres - at a moment when most British universities still required Anglican religious oaths. The college opened in 1849 with 195 students. It is now a Russell Group university with nearly 25,000 students, two Nobel laureates among its alumni, and a chair where Liam Neeson sat his entrance exams in 1971.

Image: NTF30 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Queen's University Belfast: Peel's Compromise

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WFan, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1840s the Irish question was already pressing on every British government, and Sir Robert Peel believed that one part of the answer was education. Trinity College Dublin existed but in practice excluded Catholics. Maynooth trained priests but did not educate the laity. In ...

Image: WFan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Queen's University Belfast: From College to University

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albert Bridge, CC BY-SA 2.0. The federated Queen's University of Ireland struggled. It was dissolved twice and reorganised in 1880 as the Royal University of Ireland, a purely examining body. Then in 1908, after years of negotiations with the Catholic hierarchy, the Irish Universities Act split it again, cre...

Image: Albert Bridge | CC BY-SA 2.0

Queen's University Belfast: The Nobel Laureates and the Famous Faces

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. Seamus Heaney studied English at Queen's from 1957 to 1961 and later taught here as a lecturer; he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader and Northern Ireland's first First Minister, lectured in the Law School from 1968 to 1990; he...

Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Queen's University Belfast: Through the Troubles

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridgeback57, CC BY-SA 4.0. Queen's sat in the middle of Belfast through thirty years of the Troubles. The campus was not a frontline but it could not avoid being affected: bomb scares regularly emptied the lecture halls, students from across the divide met each other for the first time in seminar rooms, th...

Image: Ridgeback57 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Queen's University Belfast: The Campus Today

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridgeback57, CC BY-SA 4.0. The university now spreads across most of south Belfast's Queen's Quarter, anchored by Lanyon's original quad but extending outward through the McClay Library, the new One Elmwood student centre opened in 2022, the Naughton Gallery, the Queen's Film Theatre (Northern Ireland's le...

Image: Ridgeback57 | CC BY-SA 4.0