This well-produced volume, charting the topographical development of Ireland's only truly industrial city, joins the Royal Irish Academy's previous publications on Belfast by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle, Irish Historic Towns Atlas, no. 12: Belfast, Part I, to 1840 (2003), and Belfast c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City (2006). This trio provides an invaluable contribution to any understanding of the history of Belfast's urban development. Belfast, Part I and Part II are in the RIA's fascinating series of fascicles of Irish towns, which includes Dublin, Kells, Downpatrick and Bandon. Beautifully produced, they are concerned with the topographical development of selected Irish towns, and follow a formula comprising an essay on the historical development of the town, maps and other topographical information. They also include drawings and photographs.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century shipbuilding was the dominant industry in Belfast and, in combination with the export business of the town, the source of its fortune. Unsurprisingly, then, this folder includes several paintings and drawings of the River Lagan, its bridges and its seafaring traffic, from c. 1860. Belfast was also a major market town, as the range of markets (potato, fruit, hay and cattle) arranged along the quayside in all the maps indicates. These markets fed the Victorian population, which rose rapidly to meet the needs of the shipyards and the factories filling the townscape. The 1901 Ordnance Survey map included in this fascicle records Belfast at the height of its industrial might, not only in the obvious profusion of factories but in its population explosion, apparent at a glance in the densely packed streets of houses.

As is clear from the maps, Belfast's urban development in the latter half of the nineteenth century was rapid, with progress literally apparent at street level. In addition to the creation of new streets (most significantly Victoria Street), improvement to the roads and footpaths of the town, while slow and often the subject of complaints to the local papers, was an ongoing process. By the 1840s street lighting in the town was being fuelled by Belfast's own gas. The Act of 1845 allowed for the widening of streets, improved lighting and management of livestock in the town, making the town centre an aesthetically more pleasing place, and one in which the genteel citizen would feel more comfortable shopping and promenading. Better street lighting also gave a feeling of added security, however real that was in practice. In the second half of the nineteenth century the issue of cleanliness dominated in Belfast, and focused on the foul-smelling Blackstaff River (colloquially known as the ‘Blackstaff nuisance’) and the town's overworked and under-performing sewers. Under the Act of 1878 the ‘Blackstaff nuisance’ was addressed, while Ormeau Avenue and the streets between it and Donegall Square were completed. Under the Act of 1884 Queen's Bridge was widened, St George's Market was enlarged and improved and Arthur Square, Rosemary Street, North Street, University Road and Stranmillis Road were improved. Almost 857 private streets were handed over to be sewered and paved between 1878 and 1896.

This drive to create more aesthetically pleasing urban centres, manifested in the Improvement Act of 1878, was articulated most prominently in Belfast with the construction of Royal Avenue in the 1880s, and later in the civic pride expressed through the building of the Free Public Library (1888) and the City Hall (1906). Such developments required labour, and Belfast had plenty of willing hands. Drawn to the urban centre by the employment opportunities offered in the linen industry, shipbuilding and trading, the influx of rural inhabitants to the urban centre was impressive. Belfast's population quadrupled between 1800 and 1851 (from 20,000 to 87,000), and again in the next 50 years (by 1901 Belfast's population was 349,000). Belfast had had a corporation since 1613, when the town received its first charter from James I. It was significantly reformed in 1840, as part of the broader move to reform municipal government in the United Kingdom, and the new corporation sat for the first time in 1842, occupying a building in Victoria Square. O'Hagan's map represents the town in 1848, and is surrounded by images of its civic development and early monumental architecture: the graceful White Linen Hall (demolished in the 1890s to provide the space for the new City Hall), the Deaf and Dumb Institute, the Ulster Railway Terminus and Queen's College. In 1871 Belfast Town Hall opened in Victoria Street. This Belfast volume also includes an interesting 1884 facsimile map of the town, by the renowned Belfast printers Marcus Ward, which provides an insight into its development on the eve of its rise to city status in 1888. The expansion of Belfast was further evidenced in the 1890s, with Queen Victoria conferring the title of lord mayor on the mayor of Belfast in 1892, and the boundary of the city being extended, with the city's wards expanding from 5 to 15, in 1896. The 1901 map in the folder provides the reader with a series of coterminous civic timelines with the Town Hall in Victoria Street marked as well as the new City Hall, still a work in progress (indicated by the fact that its name on the map is not fixed and in John Adams’ ‘Birds-eye view of Belfast’ c. 1900 it is imagined). In the rapidly expanding town the Town Hall building was soon considered too modest and Belfast's municipal fathers began to plan for the creation of a new and grander municipal home, which culminated in 1906 in the opening of Belfast City Hall in Donegall Square.

Juxtaposing the 1901 map with that of 2005 reveals the evolution of Belfast in the modern period. In the latter half of the twentieth century, urban developments in the city (particularly in the 1960s and 1970s), in addition to the ‘Troubles’, destroyed once densely populated, largely working-class areas, such as ‘Sailortown’ near the docks. Royle notes the destruction of industrial Belfast, through economic decline and decay in the inter-war period, and contemporary developers, but he concludes with a positive note about the city's future (as ‘a lively tourist and service centre’) under devolved government. Overall this fascinating collection brings to mind the poet Ciarán Carson's volume Belfast Confetti (1991) and his image of ‘a map which no longer refers to the present world, but to a history’.