ABSTRACT

For the middle classes of Belfast, the years 1830–32 were dramatic and highly charged ones. As was the case elsewhere in Britain, the reform bill’s tortuous passage through parliament and the alarming spread of Asiatic cholera provided much to occupy the public’s attention. 2 On 1 November 1831, however, the town’s citizens were provided with a momentary distraction from these preoccupations when the Belfast Natural History Society opened its new museum on College Square North. Later to become known as the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (BNHPS), this organisation was ten years old in 1831 and the opening of a museum building marked a major milestone in its development. 3 At a time when, as David Allen has put it, ‘people appear to have had the utmost difficulty in conceiving of a successful corporate entity without visible substance’, the Belfast Museum was a building with a message. 4 Replete with an impressive elevated portico, styled on that found on the temple of Andronicus Cyrrhus in Athens, it was a building that conformed to the neo-classical architectural tastes favoured in Belfast and announced the BNHPS as an established presence, both literally and figuratively, in the town’s civic and cultural fabric. 5