The Society continues to provide vital social services to this day and its poorhouse, now Clifton House, remains one of the finest buildings in Belfast.
This book explores the establishment and the developing role of the Society in the emerging city of Belfast, examining the global connections that influenced its thinking, the political and social challenges it faced throughout its 270-year history, and the enduring impact it has had on Belfast’s development. It explores the challenges that accompanied industrialisation and urban growth, and the voluntary and official responses to those challenges, in which the Society played a crucial part, placing the work of this important institution within the wider context of poverty, welfare and public health provision in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland.
