The Sunday Times

Two hundred years ago Richard Robinson, the Archbishop of Armagh, decided to transform his city into a splendid ecclesiastical capital. He enlisted the architects Thomas Cooley and Francis Johnston to help him, and between them they made Armagh a treasure house of Georgian architecture. They put architecture at the centre of the cultural agenda, the glory years they helped to create inspiring the Ulster poet W R Rodgers to describe Armagh as "raised at a time when reason was all the rage of grey and equal stone". Two centuries on, the city has gained another civic building of authority. Offering a vision of urban living rare in the province, the Market Place theatre and arts centre, which opened in March, is the result of a competition to replace the Ritz cinema, destroyed by bombers in the 1980s.