Capital spend

The Ulster Museum is to reopen in October under very different circumstances from its last major redevelopment in 1972. This was the worst year for the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with nearly 500 deaths and 10,000 shooting. Tim Cooke, the chief executive of National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI), was at school in Belfast at the time and remembers bombs going off daily.

Nearly 30 years later, the Ulster Museum has undergone its second major redevelopment since it opened in 1929. This time, Belfast, like all of Northern Ireland, is benefiting from the peace process that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and devolved power under the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The Ulster Museum (one of five venues operated by NMNI, although Armagh County Museum is to return to local authority control in 2011) has been a direct beneficiary of devolution. The lion's share of the funding for the £17.2m redevelopment has been a £11.1m grant from the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL), one of the 11 Northern Ireland departments created under devolution.

NMNI has a £32m capital investment programme from 2008 to 2011. The Ulster Museum, which has also received £4.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), is the organisation's most high-profile project.

When it opens in October, visitors will enter a 23-metre high atrium with glass and steel walkways leading into the history, art and science galleries at different levels. The centrepiece of the museum will be Window on the World, a three-storey structure that will combine key objects from the collection with an audiovisual presentation.

There will also be four learning zones and a high-level gallery for the display of glass, ceramics, silver and jewellery. The galleries are being designed by Haley Sharpe, the lead exhibition designer on the £65m Museum of Liverpool project.

It is not only the Ulster Museum that has benefited from peace in Northern Ireland. The arts in Belfast have also received a boost, with a number of other projects set to transform the city's cultural offering.

"Over the past few years, things have really turned a corner and a lot more galleries have started to open. There is a lot more activity," says Feargal O'Malley, exhibition officer at the city's well-established Ormeau Baths Gallery, which has gained from having many more arts organisations to work with.

Major investment

Recent developments have included the opening of the Space Craft gallery by the Craft and Design Collective in 2007 and the creation of Place, which holds exhibitions and events about the built environment, by the Royal Society of Ulster Architects and Belfast City Council in 2004. There are also a growing number of artists' collectives with spaces such as PS2 and Queen Street Studios.

Despite the improvements in arts provision in Belfast, progress has taken time and there are still some large gaps. Ormeau Baths Gallery, which focuses on international art exhibitions, is one of the bigger spaces, but there is still not a venue capable of holding major international blockbuster shows.

This will change in 2011 with the opening of the MAC, an £18.8m scheme being developed in the up and coming Cathedral Quarter. As well as two theatres and a dance studio, there will be three visual arts galleries totalling 1,000 sq metres.

The project, which has been designed by Belfast-based architect Hackett Hall McKnight, is being overseen by the Old Museum Arts Centre (OMAC), which will close when the MAC opens. The MAC has received nearly £11m from DCAL and £5.35m from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

"It has been a long time coming, but is very exciting," says Anne McReynolds, the MAC project director who began working on the scheme when she first joined the OMAC 13 years ago. "Devolution is relatively new here and it has taken time to build the confidence of the funders and the politicians and the belief that Belfast is able to support a project of this scale and ambition."

A scheme that dwarfs all the museum and gallery projects in Belfast is the £97m Titanic Signature Project, a visitor attraction that will tell the story of the Titanic and its construction at the city's Harland and Wolff shipbuilders from 1909 to 1911.

The centrepiece of the project will be the Titanic Experience, an exhibition that will also look at the history of Belfast and its people as well as the ship itself. The scheme also involves the restoration of the Titanic and Olympic slipways, the Thompson Dock and Harland and Wolff's former headquarters.

But the Titanic Experience is in a race against time to be ready for 2012, the centenary of the ship's maiden voyage. The project was knocked back in 2007 when it was refused £25m from the Big Lottery Fund.

A year later things were back on track when the Northern Ireland Executive announced that it would provide £43.5m. The remaining £53.5m is coming from lead developer Titanic Quarter Limited, Belfast Harbour Commissioners and Belfast City Council.

It is a complex project and with many different vested interests, work only started on the scheme in late May. But when completed it will be a timely boost to a city that has not been immune from the recession.

The Titanic - "a global brand"

Event Communications, which is also currently working on the new Museum of Bristol and the planned transport museum in Glasgow, is doing the exhibition design for the Titanic Experience. It is currently looking at how to integrate the numerous sites around the city that have links to the Titanic.

Some people in the cultural community in Northern Ireland are unsure about the viability of the project, and so far NMNI has no formal involvement, despite having a Titanic collection itself.

Indeed NMNI, which is planning a £1m upgrade of its Titanic exhibition at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, is keen to see how the Titanic Signature Project develops as it will affect its future strategy for maritime and industrial heritage.

Despite the complexity of the Titanic scheme, Event Communications CEO James Alexander is bullish about its prospects. "They are on site and everything is full-steam ahead for the April 2012 opening," he says.

"Saying that this is the most exciting project in Belfast is an understatement. This is a really significant attraction. Because of the global nature of the brand, we are looking to make it a genuinely international exhibition."

The Titanic Signature Project might have failed in its bid to secure lottery cash but money from the HLF has played a big part in improving cultural provision in Belfast. As well as the £4.5m the HLF gave to the Ulster Museum, it has provided nearly £1m for the redevelopment of the recently reopened Ulster Hall, a concert venue that includes gallery and exhibition spaces.

It also awarded £447,000 for the revamp of the Crescent Arts Centre. And the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) George Cross Foundation is hoping to get lottery funding to support the creation of a museum about Northern Ireland's police force from 1922 to 2001, although the project is not straightforward, considering the RUC's history.

But Paul Mullan, the head of the HLF in Northern Ireland, says museums and galleries are now better able to tackle Northern Ireland's past. "There is a growing confidence in being able to tell your story - how we share our past in order to share our future," he says.

"The sector has not always been able to tell the difficult stories. There is now a greater interest in going to the heart of the things, but it is still raw and it is pretty difficult. That is why we are all waiting with bated breath to see the opening of the Ulster Museum."

Mullan is referring to the Troubles Gallery, which will be part of the redeveloped Ulster Museum (see link below). Belfast still has many social, economic and political challenges, but having a gallery dedicated to its contested past shows how far Northern Ireland has moved on since the 1972 redevelopment of the Ulster Museum when experiencing the Troubles for real was an all-too-common experience.