54.5973°N / 5.9301°W · United Kingdom
One shape on this map belongs to no other city: the shipyard, too regular to be natural and too big to be anything else. Belfast grew at the head of its lough because of it.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
The lough fills the top of the sheet, a broad flat of water narrowing towards the city. Its southern shore is all quays, and among them the basins run in parallel, unmistakable. A narrow river comes down from the south-west and reaches the lough among those quays: the city spread along it, filling its valley. Westward, the built fabric climbs to the first slopes of high hills; eastward, an airport sits on the shore itself.
Two things you will not find. The twin cranes that serve the yard are neither water nor road, so nothing at all: the yard reads through its basins alone, which is enough. And the mud of the lough, uncovered at low tide, is never drawn, so the water will look full whatever the hour. One warning too: the hills to the west take only a very faint grey, so the city looks a little more open on that side than it really is.
A great deal of water here, and in two very different kinds: the broad soft flat of the lough, and the hard rectangles of the basins. That is a gift, because one palette gives you both a landscape and a geometry. Choose a water tone strong enough for the basins to read as separate shapes rather than merging into the quays. Do not count on the western hills for green: they take barely any tint at all.
Portrait, lough at the top and city below. The setting is decided by the basins: come too close and they run off the sheet, pull too far back and they shrink to hatching. The chosen frame holds them whole alongside the head of the lough, at the cost of a centre that stays fairly small.
The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a slipway, a launch year, the name of a street off the Lagan: that line puts the cranes back, since the drawing cannot.
The modern plan begins with the plantation of Sir Arthur Chichester, who rebuilt the castle and repeopled the borough with English settlers. What had been a village at the bottom of a sea inlet became a town. Everything you see spreading up the valley grew from that decision, and none of it is older.
Harland and Wolff settled on the island in the lough and grew from an acre and a half with a hundred men to eighty acres with ten thousand. The rectangular basins on your print are that growth, dug rather than built: to make ships bigger, they made water where there had been land. It is one of the few places where an industrial history reads directly as geometry.
The Titanic was built on the island's slipways, which were rebuilt for her, and left the lough in 1912. The slipways are still in the ground, and the basins around them are still water. Your print shows the site rather than the ship, which is perhaps the more honest way to keep it.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The bridge over the river on the way in, the yard seen from the far shore, the road that climbed towards the hills. The lough is the same for everyone. What you had at the end of your street is not.
Compose my Belfast print
