When you think of the world’s great crumbling monuments, what comes to mind? The ashy ruins of Pompei? The jungle-smothered walls of Machu Picchu? Egypt’s great pyramids, sitting windswept in the desert?
The World Monuments Fund (WMF) just published the 2025 edition of its ‘watch’ list of at-risk cultural sites around the globe. The WMF is an organisation that highlights vital cultural sites challenged by things like climate change, mass tourism, natural disasters and war, and it also contributes towards saving those sites.
The WMF’s 2025 ‘watch’ list was published this week and features the likes of the urban fabric of Gaza, the monasteries of Albania’s Drino Valley and the Moon (find the full list here). But it also includes somewhere much closer to home: making the WMF’s list is the Belfast Assembly Rooms.
Belfast’s Assembly Rooms was built in 1769 and, over the next two centuries, was host to many significant events including the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 and court martials following the Irish Rebellion of 1798. In the 19th century it was repurposed for the Belfast Banking Company, and the building found use as a cultural venue in 2000. Since then, it’s remained largely disused and has fallen into disrepair.
The WMF describes the Belfast Assembly Rooms: ‘Amid memories of violence, the now-vacant Assembly Rooms stand as a quiet symbol of Belfast’s tradition of civic engagement and cultural exchange.’
But all isn’t lost for the Assembly Rooms. In 2023 the Assembly Rooms Alliance was established to turn the building into the Museum of the Troubles and Peace – and it’s the Assembly Rooms Alliance that the WMF is looking to support in 2025,
The WMF says that it wants to help the Assembly Rooms Alliance with ‘preserving and transforming one of Belfast’s oldest civic buildings into a multi-purpose cultural hub’. In the immediate future, this means taking the building into public ownership and undertaking essential repairs.
So, here’s to better times for the Belfast Assembly Rooms! Find all 25 sites on the WMF’s list here.
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