Shipbuilding Returns to Historic Harland & Wolff Shipyard in Belfast

Harland & Wolff’s historic Belfast shipyard, perhaps best known for building the Titanic, has won its first new order since the company’s insolvency in 2019.

The order calls for the fabrication of 11 barges for UK-based waste management and recycling company Cory for operation on the River Thames around London. The initial contract is worth approximately £8.5 million.

Fabrication will take place at Harland & Wolff’s famous Belfast site in Northern Ireland, where steel cutting is expected to take place in eight weeks. The shipbuilding program will allow four barges to be built in tandem with all 11 barges to be delivered by mid-2023.

The contract is the first new order for Harland and Wolff since it filed for insolvency in 2019 after its former Norwegian owner, Dolphin Drilling, filed for bankrupcty earlier that same year. The shipyard was subsequently acquired by UK-based InfraStrata, which later changed its name to Harland & Wolff Group Holdings as it worked to reactivate all four of its facilities across the UK.

“With this material contract, we shall be opening up our vast undercover fabrication halls in Belfast and making optimal use of our new robotic welding panel line,” said Harland & Wolff Group CEO John Wood. “This contract gives us the opportunity to optimise our production flows in readiness for other fabrication programmes in our pipeline and it demonstrates the variety of fabrication work that our facilities are ideally placed to execute upon.

The Belfast shipyard has roots dating back to 1861 and employed more than 30,000 people during its peak in WWII.

“I am delighted to have secured this contract with our new client, Cory Group, and look forward to working very closely with them to deliver on their new barge investment programme going forward,” Wood added.

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