UrbanRenewal: Building work on Belfast's €1.5 billion Titanic Quarter project is due to begin later this year, writes Fiona Tyrrell
Dublin property developers Harcourt Developments will begin construction of Belfast's Titanic Quarter, the biggest property development scheme ever undertaken in Northern Ireland, later this year.
Planning permission has just been secured for the first part of the project, which will form an entrance to the Titanic Quarter - a £1 billion (€1.5 billion) urban regeneration project on the 185-acre former shipyard area in Belfast. The entire scheme is expected to take up to 15 to 20 years to complete.
The first phase, located close to the Odyssey leisure complex, will involve 13,935sq m (150,000sq ft) of office space, a 120-bed hotel and 460 apartments.
Located at Queen's Island within the Belfast Harbour area, the site was formerly part of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, which in its heyday employed over 30,000 people and was one of the main economic drivers of Belfast's growth until the second World War.
The ambitious scheme will involve the construction of a new business quarter, commercial and industrial space, over 3,000 homes, leisure developments and a major tourist scheme as well as the construction of cruise liner berths.
The mixed-use scheme is being jointly developed via a public-private partnership between the Belfast Harbour Commissioners and Titanic Island Ltd, a sister company of Harcourt Developments, which was involved in the Park West development off the M50 in west Dublin. Pat Doherty's Harcourt Developments paid £48 million (€77 million) for Fred Olsen's lands in Titanic Quarter last year.
Plans for the 185-acre site include a business quarter which hopes to attract inward investment to the city and will comprise over 180,000sq m (1,937,500sq ft) of office, research and development and business space. The site will also contain over 130,000sq m (1,399,307sq ft) of light industrial and commercial space as well as a range of local neighbourhood services and over 41,000sq m (441,320sq ft) of leisure developments including cafés, bars and health and fitness clubs.
The scheme will also feature a heritage project at the old shipyard site where the Titanic was built. The listed former Harland & Wolff headquarters will be converted into a four-star hotel. Plans for the Titanic Project, which are being developed by Belfast City Council and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, will include an interactive Titanic heritage and visitor attraction as well as a berth for visiting cruise liners.
The developers are keen to ensure that the site, which is three-quarters of the size of Belfast city centre, is very well connected to the hub of the city and functions as an extension to the city, according to chief executive of the Titanic Quarter Mike Scott.
The scheme is essentially a north-easterly extension to the highly successful riverfront renewal project which was undertaken by Laganside Corporation over the past decade on both sides of the River Lagan and which has the Waterfront Hall as its focal point.
The scheme will provide a new urban quarter for Belfast, create some 20,000 jobs for Belfast and attract inward investment, according to Mr Scott.
Already operating from Titanic Quarter is the 24-acre Northern Ireland Science Park, which is backed by Queen's University, University of Ulster and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment.
The park provides "hot house" facilities to both indigenous and foreign high-tech companies while they are at their fledgling stages, according to chief executive officer of the science park Prof Norman Apsley.
Two facilities are already up and running - a 5,200sq m (56,000sq ft) Innovation Centre and the Queen's University-backed Electronics, Communications and IT Research Institute.
The Innovation Centre opened in late 2003 and is almost fully let with over 500 people working on-site for 17 different companies. Occupants in the Innovation Centre include a mix of inward investors, including Microsoft, and indigenous firms such as Meridio (software) and Xenosense (food diagnostics).
The park offers corporate standard IT facilities, flexible lease terms and workspaces designed to meet the demands of high-tech companies.
Developments such as the science park, the Titanic Quarter, the Odyssey Arena (Ireland's largest all-seater indoor venue), and the redevelopment of the riverside bear witness to how much Belfast has changed, according to Colin Lewis from Invest Northern Ireland.
"Northern Ireland's economy has gone through a sea change over the last few years and this can be traced back to the IRA ceasefire, which kicked everything into gear. Since then the economy has begun to grow very fast compared to the rest of UK."
As a result, unemployment is down to about 5 per cent, all forms of investment and output have increased dramatically and investor confidence is high. And what is even better, according to Mr Lewis, is that all of this development is private sector-led.
"Once you are able to attract a major player it provides a very good test case for others and you encourage copy-cat investment," he says. "Once Belfast had a terrible reputation and now it's regarded as normal."
