The builder of the Titanic is struggling to stay afloat
Harland and Wolff is fighting for its life
When it built the Titanic in 1911, Harland and Wolff was the world’s biggest shipyard. Where it once employed 35,000 people, there are now just a few hundred workers. But the 163-year-old company remains an institution whose significance to Belfast outweighs its size. Its own increasingly desperate struggle to stay afloat is of symbolic importance to the city and the wider shipbuilding industry. It also provides clues to the willingness of the new Labour government to help out troubled firms.
The company was central to the boom which built Belfast into a manufacturing behemoth of the early 20th century. The yard’s massive yellow gantry cranes, Samson and Goliath, have become emblematic of Northern Ireland’s capital. A marble statue of Edward Harland still stands outside Belfast city hall. The firm he built has a darker resonance, too. As Ireland moved towards partition in 1920, more than 2,000 Catholic workers were violently expelled from the yard. To this day, just 10% of its workforce is Catholic.
The sprawling yard at Queen’s Island, a reclaimed area on the city’s waterfront, tells the story not just of 20th-century Belfast but of Britain. From it came the aircraft-carriers, cruisers and tanks which helped defeat Nazi Germany. It built Sea Quest, the rig which discovered Britain’s first North Sea oil; more recently it has assembled some of the giant wind turbines weaning the economy off that same oil.
Harland and Wolff also tells the story of the post-war shipbuilding industry in Britain. Increased air travel, a shrinking navy and cheaper foreign competition undermined it. Nationalisation was tried, and then reversed. In 2019 the firm almost collapsed, only to be bought for £5.3m ($6.9m) by InfraStrata, a London-based energy firm that promised a new start. Last year the Belfast yard built its first new vessel in 20 years—a barge to carry rubbish. Greater things were in store. In early 2023 the Tory government announced that naval shipbuilding would return to Belfast; the contract is meant to see three Royal Navy support ships assembled in the city.
Whether Harland and Wolff will be around to do the work is very uncertain. The company failed to file its audited accounts on June 30th, meaning that trading in its shares was suspended; they still haven’t materialised. (The firm declined to make anyone available for interview and failed to respond to our written questions.) Another key venture has stalled: an ambitious plan to provide a quarter of Britain’s natural-gas storage capacity in caverns 1,500m below Larne Lough, 15 miles from Belfast, is in doubt after a judge quashed licences for the project.
This is more than an issue for one medium-sized company (Harland and Wolff has three other yards in England and Scotland, employing 1,500 people in all). It has also turned into an early test of the new Labour government’s appetite for market intervention. On July 22nd the government confirmed that after a good look at the company’s financial data it had refused to underwrite a £200m loan and also ruled out any emergency liquidity funding. In a gloomy assessment, the government said there was “a very substantial risk that taxpayer money would be lost” if it underwrote the loan. The market, it said, is best placed to resolve the issue. The company’s ceo, John Wood, promptly stepped down.
The firm may yet be able to gain access to credit at high interest rates. But if the business does go under, its home patch will continue to flourish. In 2003 Harland & Wolff sold 75 hectares (185 acres) of land and buildings for £47m (36 hectares are left). This industrial wasteland has since been redeveloped into Titanic Quarter, an area filled with apartments, it jobs and creative industries rather than welders streaming to build ships. The vast paint hall used for Titanic is a film studio where dramatic scenes in “Game of Thrones”, a dragons-and-gore tv series, were shot. The old drawing offices where ships were planned are now the splendid bar of the Titanic hotel, opened in 2017. The romance of the area centres on its greatest failure. That will endure even if the shipyard that built the doomed liner does not. ■
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