Belfast Buildings Trust
Architectural conservation trust in Northern Ireland
The Belfast Buildings Trust (BBT), founded in 1996 as the Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust, is a cross-community building preservation trust with charitable status that delivers physical, social, and economic regeneration through the reuse of landmark buildings in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Each building rescued by the trust seeks to regenerate the community it serves in a variety of ways, from traditional skills promotion to job creation and engendering a sense of civic pride. The BBT's work demonstrates what can be achieved through vision, determination and community energy. It is committed to restoring to Belfast those buildings that make it special, and which are landmarks in the heart of the city's communities.
The current chairman is John Marshall BEM, retired registrar at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. The founding chair, Fionnuala Jay-O'Boyle CBE DL, with a background in public affairs, has extensive experience of regeneration projects having been a trustee of a number of regeneration charities, including the Prince's Regeneration Trust.
Completed projects
The BBT has completed three regeneration projects: St Patrick's School, Donegall Street; Christ Church, College Square North; and The Gate Lodge at the former Good Shepherd Convent on Ormeau Road, which now serves as the trust's headquarters.
St Patrick's National School (1828)
St Patrick's was built by Newryborn architect Timothy Hevey on land donated by the Marquess of Donegall for the first Catholic national school in the city. It continued to serve the educational needs of the north of the city until it closed in 1982.
Christ Church (1832)
This church, built by the Dublin architect William Farrell suffered a declining congregation and closed in the early 1990s including an arson attack in 1995.
The public source identifies “Belfast Buildings Trust” as architectural conservation trust in Northern Ireland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Belfast, Buildings and Trust.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belfast Buildings Trust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.