Belfast plans major new visitor attraction

Belfast City Council is planning to build a major new visitor attraction to capitalise on the success of the Titanic Quarter, a Built Environment Networking event has heard.

Speaking at the Northern Ireland Development Plans Conference Sinead Grimes, Head of Investment Programme Delivery and Projects at Belfast City Council, said that the dockside Titanic-themed attraction gets around 1m visitors per annum and has received more than £450m of investment over the past decade: “People are visiting and leaving without going to the city centre. Therefore we’re looking at plans for a second regionally significant tourism attraction in the city centre through the development of a new destination hub for the city.”

She said the new attraction would both showcase city’s art achievements and history.

Grimes said that Belfast’s local development plan, which is currently being consulted on, envisages a one-fifth growth in both the number of both jobs and residents across the city. It allows for an additional 1.5m sq ft of grade A office accommodation, the supply of which has failed to keep pace with demand in recent years, by 2021.

To kickstart the delivery of this high quality office space, the authority has launched an investment fund and recently purchased the former Belfast Telegraph newspaper building, which has been lined up as the potential location for a creative hub.

Plans for the North East Quarter on the North Foreshore of Belfast Lough include a new campus for the Ulster University campus and a proposed £400m mixed use development, formerly known as the Royal Exchange.
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Grimes said a new park and an anaerobic digestion facility, which would generate electricity from organic waste, were also being lined up on the North Foreshore. She said the first phase of the new office development proposed on the former Sirocco site, also on the Belfast waterfront, should be on site by the end of this year after recently receiving planning permission.

And the Department for Social Development had drawn up a masterplan for the inner north west area around Smithfield market and Sailortown area. Grimes said tenants including UTV have moved into the first two buildings in the Belfast Harbour’s £750m City Quays development with work under way on a multi storey car park and future plans for new office developments.

Turning to the city’s wider infrastructure, she said the proposed £180m York St interchange will remove the last bottleneck on the Belfast to Dublin road corridor. But Belfast still faces major challenges, Grimes added, including the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, which has prompted Belfast to become one of the first UK councils to set up a dedicated Brexit committee.

Damien Toner; Director of Estates at Queens University, said that Northern Ireland is the only UK region which has cut investment in in higher education over the last decade. As a result, he said funding per student had decreased by seven per cent since 2010, while increasing over same period in England and Wales.

Across Northern Ireland, Toner said there are 2260 fewer higher education places than three years ago, helping to fuel a brain drain which sees the province export 36% of its school leavers every year. He said government grants had shrunk from 35% of Queen’s total funding to just 11%, meaning increased reliance on loans.

But it is important for Northern Irish universities to keep investing in capital projects in order to attract students, Toner warned: “We will lose our ability to compete and further damage our ability to meet the skills challenges of the Northern Ireland economy.”

New projects include the expansion of the former David Bates library, which will operate 24 hours a day when it is completed in 2020. He said the university hopes to start construction work on a replacement of its existing students union in 2019 and the new £9m ECIT building in the Titanic quarter, which is at an advanced state of planning.

And the university is drawing up an outline business case for an expansion of its management school, which it aims to complete in the 2021/22 academic year.

John Glass, Infrastructure & Projects Executive of Translink, said that the Northern Ireland transport authority has hit a 20 year high of 81m passenger journeys. But he said that the province’s public transport system had suffered from too many years of under investment, which Translink is attempting to remedy with £350m of investment in four key transport hubs.

These include the Belfast transport hub which incorporates proposals for mixed-use development on the surrounding ten acres of land.

He said Translink is waiting for a planning decision on the project, which has been called in by the government. But Glass said work has started on the construction of Derry’s £27m hub, which includes a new park and ride and improved facilities for bus services to the south of Northern Ireland.

And at Portrush, contractor Graham is working on a new hub that needs to be delivered by the Open golf tournament next year, when the town is set to host 200,000 visitors.

And Translink is taking a business case forward for an upgrade of the York Gate station, close to Clarendon Docks, the area around which is due to see an increase in students. However the ongoing suspension of the Northern Ireland was slowing decision making, he said: “We need people with the power to make decisions so we can move forward.”
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