CS Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was just nine when he left Belfast, moving from his childhood home of Little Lea, in the east of the city, to boarding school in England after the death of his mother. Then he enrolled at Oxford and in the British army, never returning to Northern Ireland for more than holidays.
But Lewis’s homeland remained a powerful force in his emotional life and his imagination. When, decades after leaving, he began to write his first children’s book, it was to his own childhood that he returned for inspiration: Little Lea, a rambling lodge on Circular Road, had “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude”; his father’s vast library was full of “endless books” about world mythology; and Cave Hill loomed beyond the gardens, part of a view that on fine days stretched as far as Belfast Lough and the Irish Sea beyond.
Belfast has changed dramatically from when Lewis knew it, but on a bright spring day you can climb the red road through the Stormont Estate parklands to the viewing point in front of Parliament Buildings and see the expanse of the same landscape that Lewis would have as a boy. The redbrick castle of Campbell College, where he studied briefly before he was sent across the sea to Malvern College, is home to the distinctive iron lamp-post that Lewis reimagined as marking the boundary between the worlds of reality and fantasy in The Chronicles of Narnia.
You can catch glimpses of some of his characters on the streets as well, if you follow Newtownards Road down to CS Lewis Square, an urban plaza in honour of the writer that was formally opened in 2016 by Douglas Gresham, his stepson....
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