Duke ofYork

The Duke of York sits up Commercial Court, a cobbled alley in the Cathedral Quarter, and has been Willie Jack's pub since the early 1980s. Jack rebuilt it after the 1972 bomb that flattened the entry, and has filled it over forty years with the collected ephemera of Belfast and Ulster pub life — enamel signs, mirrors, old whiskey advertising — until the walls became the attraction. He owns it outright and runs it with a free hand, part of a small clutch of independent bars he has opened around the same few streets; he was appointed MBE in 2023 for services to hospitality. It is a free house with a genuine sense of place, the anchor of the quarter's drinking life.