Nick Ross

Born in 1947, Nick came to Belfast as a student to read psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, where the Nobel-Laureate Seamus Heaney was among his teachers. He graduated with a BA (Hons) and later became a Doctor of the University. He remained in Northern Ireland for several years, reporting on the Troubles for the BBC. Since then he has become one of the best known broadcasters in the United Kingdom, covering news, current affairs, politics and crime. He is perhaps best known today for presenting the BBC programme, Crimewatch.

When, as a starry-eyed student from London, I first arrived in Belfast it was dreary and depressing. The weather on that autumn Sunday didn’t help: leaden skies above bleak hills, an endless maze of mean and grimy redbrick terraces. It seemed a long way from home. On Monday the sun came out, the people emerged, and the city turned out to have a vibrancy I would never have guessed at the day before. I have loved it ever since. Belfast is a hugely friendly city – perhaps the nicer people are the harder they fall out – and along with some of the best watering holes in the world it now has seriously fine restaurants, great cultural centres and a bustling nightlife.

The fabric of the city is incomparably improved since I first arrived there – but the place that for me became home, around Queen’s University, is more or less unchanged. The whole campus district around University Road, College Green and University Square still has a classic, slightly battered, academic elegance. Beyond, you can cruise up Malone Road past university departments and into the posh suburbs.

But if you're visiting Belfast soak up its troubled history too. Unlike Chicago which tries to bury its Prohibition past, this town still bears defiant hints of what happened in the 1970s and 80s: tribal murals and territorial markings, and a Peace Line standing sentinel between two halves of the city. Travel west as I did every day up the hill to see my girlfriend in Ballymurphy, now rather more dapper than it was back then with its barricades; or head out towards the shipyards, still framed by the great Samson and Goliath cranes, where other friends lived, in more sense than one, on the other side of town. Belfast is buzzing; and beyond the city is one of the most beautiful provinces in Europe.