Queen’s Arcade

Before developer George Fisher erected his ornate Victorian arcade in 1880, the site belonged to Dr. James McDonnell, the Father of Belfast Medicine, who co-founded what became the Royal Victoria Hospital and established a music academy to teach blind children to play the harp. Fisher built the arcade to house his Castle Restaurant, complete with thirty finely-fitted shops beneath decorative ironwork and glass that still shelters visitors today. The monogram “AR” still visible on the third floor references Austin Reed, installed after a 1937 fire that could have ended the whole thing.

It didn’t. While sister arcades across Belfast vanished to bombs, economic shifts, and urban renewal, Queen’s Arcade endured, the city’s sole surviving Victorian shopping passage, linking its busiest streets through the same ornate canopy that sheltered shoppers in 1880. Lunn’s Jewellers, a company that started as a tenant in the arcade, eventually bought the entire building in 2002, nearly fifty years after first setting up shop inside it.

There is something quietly remarkable about a tenant who loved a building enough to buy it. Queen’s Arcade has been that kind of place for a long time.