Avenue Hall – the building at the junction of Lower Garfield Street and North Street – was built in 1896, with ground-floor shops and upstairs ballrooms. The upstairs rooms were damaged by fire in 1990 and the last occupied unit on the ground floor was the Tivoli barbers, which held on until 2013 before moving to North Street. The shutters of the ground-floor shops, along with much of the derelict (lower) North Street, were covered with graffiti, and in 2012 became the epicentre of ‘Shutter Scape’, the first year of what came to be called Hit The North (see Visual History 11 and the historical map). The blocked-up windows of the upper floor were also painted, in 2014.

Future Belfast lists three potential developments and developers, in 2000, 2012, and 2016, and there were others in 2017 and in 2020. Castlebrooke currently has request for comments on its latest plan for the whole Garfield and Donegall Street area (RSUA | pdf). The current scaffolding was erected in 2018 along with the hoarding around the bottom, which was painted by Danni Simpson (‘Bout Ye, Belfast). Some demolition of the interior took place; the facade is protected by a grade B2 listing in 1991 (Plan Belfast | Future Belfast). Seven years later, the hoarding and the scaffolding still stand, and the hoarding has been repainted with a variety of Belfast sayings – “Aye”, “Dead on”, “Grand”, “Class”, “Awk, hiya” – painted by Alana McDowell (ig). The first part, above, replaces the anti-homelessness art in Life In A Bag.

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Copyright © 2026 Paddy Duffy
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