Two and three storey red brick terraces carry shopfronts and flats above, running straight toward Queen's University and the Botanic Gardens.
What Botanic Avenue looks like
Two and three storey red brick terraces line both sides of the street. Their ground floors are cut into shopfronts under awnings and painted fascias, with flats and offices in the storeys above. A few corner buildings add extra retail space at street level. The block at the University Street corner has two ground floor shopfronts with a pair of flats above them, and the end of terrace building on Mount Charles has a rear return beside its own ground floor unit.
At the Cameron Street corner, the former Reformed Presbyterian church at number 42 keeps its Romanesque arches and round headed windows. A lower course of pale Scrabo stone sits under the red brick above, with a pair of green doors at the top of a short flight of steps. It now operates as a music venue. Toward the park end, sits back behind iron railings and a lawn, its Scrabo stone front cut with columns and round headed windows.
Independent shopfronts fill the run between them. A secondhand and crime fiction bookshop and an optician's with a dark blue timber front and bay display windows both open straight onto the pavement. Cafes, restaurants and pubs occupy other ground floors along the block, their fascias and awnings repeating the same storey heights as the buildings around them.
and the junction with Lower Crescent mark the street's northern end, where a stucco fronted hotel takes the corner. At the southern end the terraces give way to the gates of Queen's University and the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.
Shot in Botanic Avenue
Conversations with Friends used a bookshop on this stretch of the avenue as a stand in for Dublin. The series is adapted from Sally Rooney's novel. No Alibis, a crime and mystery bookshop, trades from number 83.
Conversations with Friends, 2022
Played a secondhand and crime fiction bookshop, Dublin, Ireland, present day
No Alibis appears in the series as a Dublin bookshop. It is a working crime and mystery bookshop, used largely as found for the Dublin set scenes. Street View
Byres Road runs through Hillhead the same way, a university adjacent street of ground floor shopfronts cut into tenement blocks with flats above. The scale and the shopfront rhythm match closely. Byres Road's tenements are sandstone, not brick. They also run four storeys against Botanic Avenue's three, so a wide shot gives the difference away faster than a tight one. Try searching sandstone tenement shopfronts now.
Marchmont's tenement blocks went up between 1876 and 1914, with corner shopfronts cut into the ground floor the same way Botanic Avenue's are, close to the Meadows and the university district south of the city centre. Marchmont's blocks are pink sandstone rather than red brick, running four and five storeys against Botanic Avenue's three, so the proportions sit differently in a wide shot. Try searching corner tenement shopfronts now.
Rathmines in Dublin, Ireland
Red brick Victorian terraces line Rathmines Road Lower above a busy run of shops, closer to Botanic Avenue's own brick and scale than the Scottish tenement streets. The street sits in a city centre suburb though, rather than beside a university campus. Irish street furniture and right hand drive traffic make a wide shot look like Dublin rather than Belfast, so tighter frames on the shopfronts themselves work best. Try searching red brick terraces now.
