Ulster Museum & Botanic Gardens

About the museum and the gardens

The Ulster Museum and the Botanic Gardens occupy the same 28-acre patch of south Belfast, next to Queen's University. They are managed by different bodies — the museum by National Museums NI, the park by Belfast City Council — but they have grown together. You can walk in one entrance off Stranmillis Road, spend the morning in the museum, lunch in the gardens, an hour in the Palm House, and leave by another gate. Both are free.

The Ulster Museum traces its line back to the Belfast Natural History Society of 1821 and moved to its present site in 1929 as the Belfast Municipal Museum. The original building is a restrained classical block by James Cumming Wynne. The much larger and more divisive extension was added in 1972 by Francis Pym — a Brutalist composition of cubic concrete projections that fits awkwardly against the older building but on its own terms is one of the more powerful buildings of its decade in Ireland. The interior, refurbished in 2009 for £17 million, links the two with sweeping galleries on art, archaeology, natural history and the Troubles.

The collection is broad and rewards repeated visits. The most famous single object is Takabuti, the mummified Egyptian woman brought to Belfast in 1834 and the first mummy unwrapped in the United Kingdom. The Girona gallery holds gold and silver recovered from the Spanish Armada galleass that sank off the Antrim coast in 1588 — jewellery, coins, a salamander pendant. The art collection includes work from Lavery, Yeats and Conor; the Troubles galleries deal with the recent past with thoughtful restraint.

The Botanic Gardens around it were planted as a private subscription garden in 1828 and bought by Belfast Corporation in 1895. Two Victorian glasshouses are the highlights. The Palm House, completed in 1840 to designs by Charles Lanyon and ironwork by Richard Turner, is one of the earliest curvilinear cast-iron glasshouses in the world, predating Kew's and Glasnevin's. The Tropical Ravine, opened in 1889 to a design by head gardener Charles McKimm, has visitors walk a raised balcony around a sunken indoor jungle. Both restored under the council's 21st-century programme, both free, both warm in the rain.

The whole site is a good place to spend a wet afternoon. The museum can absorb three hours easily. The gardens give you somewhere to put a sandwich and a flask when you come out. Queen's University sits across the road, and the campus quadrangle is open to walk through if you want a few more minutes of Victorian Belfast on the way back to the city centre.

Essential information

Walk from town

Easiest from City Hall — 25 minutes on foot down Bedford Street and University Road, through the Queen's quad, into the gardens.

For a wet day

The museum, the Palm House and the Tropical Ravine can fill a whole rainy afternoon and you don't need to step outside for more than a minute at a time.

With children

The Discover History gallery and the dinosaur skeleton on the ground floor work for younger visitors. The garden has a play area and big lawns to run on.

Events

Lates, talks, family workshops and temporary exhibitions throughout the year. Booking ahead is recommended for popular shows.

Dogs

Welcome in the gardens on leads. Not inside the museum or the glasshouses.

Refreshments

Café inside the museum, smaller kiosk in the park in season. Stranmillis Road and Botanic Avenue have plenty of independent cafés a few minutes' walk away.