Creating Belfast

Creating Belfast describes the growth of technical education in Belfast over a 120-year period during which the town developed from a small mercantile community into a large, bustling, industrial city.

It explains how technical education contributed to that growth, and how the concept of technical education evolved from the mastery of a trade to include knowledge of the relevant sciences and their possible applications to industry.

Whilst the school system made modest inputs to technical education, the book shows that its development throughout the nineteenth century was critically dependent on the efforts of enthusiasts and philanthropists. Serious government intervention did not materialise until the turn of the twentieth century, when grants became available for the development of a co-ordinated system of technical education in Belfast, culminating in the opening of the Belfast Municipal Technical Institute in 1907.