Launch of ‘Surviving the City’

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Dr Olwen Purdue (QUB) with co-organisers Ian Montgomery and Janet Hancock of PRONI.

Last night we launched our project exhibition ‘Surviving the City: Poverty and Public Health in Belfast 1888-1914’ at PRONI. The exhibition highlights, through images and text from primary sources, the experience of poverty and poor health in the period of Belfast’s most rapid population and economic expansion, between the granting of city status in 1888 and the outbreak of the First World War. We explore the underside of ‘booming Belfast’ through a series of panels on ‘The emerging city’, ‘Growing pains’, ‘Charity’, ‘Work’, ‘Welfare’ and ‘Public Health’. We’ll be posting images of the panels here in the near future, but in the meantime, you can see them at PRONI before we tour them to public libraries and other sites in the city.