HERITAGE & HABITAT:IT HAS BEEN billed as "Europe's largest and most exciting waterfront development", teeming with luxury flats, hotels, restaurants, parklands, galleries and theatres – and a state-of-the-art Titanic museum, with a wow factor to rival the Eiffel Tower – but there's not a great deal to see yet out on Belfast's TitanicQuarter, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
Open-top tour buses chug around the bleak, windswept streets of the former shipyard on Queen's Island, and tourists gaze out at the vast expanses of cindery wasteland, the piles of scrap, the ancient warehouses marked with fading Harland and Wolff signage, the half-built apartments, and the glossy adverts inviting passersby to "see yourself living the dream . . . in TitanicQuarter".
It’s a curious mixture of Belfast’s decaying industrial past and its wildly ambitious projected future as a “world-class” destination.
Since its inception, TitanicQuarter has been a controversial project. Locally, opinion is divided between supporters, who consider Belfast's connection with the globally recognised Titanic"brand" to be both a tourist magnet and an unmissable opportunity for inward investment, and critics, some of whom are concerned that the project will suck public money away from much-needed redevelopment in the city centre. Others fear the whole enterprise is driven too much by commercial rather than cultural considerations, and that the city's cultural community have been insufficiently involved. On the Urban Grumblings blog (urbangrumblings.wordpress.com), TitanicQuarter is described as "a generic, post-modernist nowhere place" offering little more than a "romanticist nod to the glory of the Titanic's brief life and little else".
Similar misgivings are explored in The Truth Commissioner, by Belfast-born novelist David Park. The novel's central character, Henry Stanfield, muses that "already they are talking of restoring this place in the city's favourite passion of self-consoling mythology. It will, no doubt, be a giant theme park where they will . . . hope to bring in the tourists from Japan, from America, from everywhere, for an exclusively virtual experience. It saddens Stanfield to think of the vulgarity that will be unleashed, the way he imagines this place will become the equivalent of some casino town in the Nevada desert."
But Michael Graham, director of corporate real estate at TitanicQuarter, claims that the project is much more than a glorified residential venture. He points to the recent launch of Belfast Metropolitan College's new campus on the site, and to the re-use of the vast shipyard paint hall as studio space. It was transformed into a post-apocalyptic city for the science fiction film City of Ember, and currently houses a full-scale medieval castle as the backdrop for a new Hollywood film, Your Highness, estimated to be worth £10 million (€11.6 million) to the local economy.
The proposed TitanicSignature Project, expected to cost £97 million (€113 million), has created most interest. To be housed in a striking building designed by American architect Eric Kuhne, based on the logo of Titanic's owners the White Star Line, the museum will include a "four-dimensional" flying theatre that will take passengers on a virtual dive down to the liner's final resting place on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. "This will be the real deal, a mix between a museum and a theme park, presenting historical information in the form of infotainment," says Graham. The Northern Ireland Executive, Belfast Harbour Commissioners, Belfast City Council and TitanicQuarter are jointly footing the bill.
But with the centenary of the Titanicdisaster in 2012 fast approaching, there are serious doubts about whether this ambitious experience will be ready on time. Meanwhile,Southampton, where the liner began her ill-fated maiden voyage, is planning its own interactive museum in time to mark the centenary of tragedy. Construction was supposed to begin on the Belfast project last January, but the schedule has been beset with delays. And this week it was reported that the key funders behind the scheme have not yet signed a legal agreement setting out the terms relating to the funding, development and operation of the TitanicSignature Project.
No public agencies or institutions appear able or willing to elaborate on what stage the project is at, or to confirm which body will be responsible for curating the museum. National Museums Northern Ireland refers The Irish Timesto the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. It in turn directs queries about the Signature Project to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI). A spokesperson for DETI responds only to say that "discussions are continuing with funding partners to conclude the legal agreement". Despite TitanicQuarter's confidence that all will be well, until agreement is reached it appears that the Signature Project is drifting in the doldrums.
And online property discussion forums are awash with buyers and investors who have paid their deposits on TitanicQuarter apartments and are nervous about their future prospects.
One particular thread runs to 41 pages. But the developers remain resolutely upbeat, claiming to have secured finance before the credit crunch really began to bite. Last year TitanicQuarter won the Property Deal of the Year award at the Irish Property Awards for securing CitiGroup as anchor tenant for its high-profile Gateway office. "We are well placed to weather the recession, more by luck than by design," insists Graham.
"The big reason that TitanicQuarter will succeed is that the demand is there," says Tim McKane, chief executive of creative services at Belfast-based advertising agency Fire IMC. "Normally you create a product and spend millions on creating demand. Not here. There are interested parties all over the world, because Titanicis a world-famous brand. There are Titanicgroups and societies all over Japan and the US. If anything, we are underestimating worldwide interest." McKane has no time for those he calls the naysayers. "It's in the Northern Irish character to say, 'this is a disaster, this is a waste of money'. If someone here says 'I like it', there's always another that says 'I don't'."
BUT DAWN PURVIS, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party and MLA for East Belfast – an area that once fed the shipyard with many thousands of workers – believes there are serious concerns that go beyond wilful naysaying. "I think it started off as a great money-making idea, when property prices were through the roof, and people saw the tourist potential in the birthplace of the Titanic. But there is a need for social and affordable housing to be pepper-potted around the site, so the community has a buy-in to the development," she says.
“You look at developments such as Dublin docklands and Ballymun, and you see benefits to the entire community. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. But we need political leaders and Ministers to sit down with developers and look at what’s possible, to maximise the benefits to Northern Ireland as a whole. I don’t think anyone has sat down and asked ‘what is the vision here?’ It needs more than profit as a driver.”
"Where once we built ships, now we build communities," the TitanicQuarter advertisements announce. But others share Purvis's concern about a lack of equitable vision for the project. There are fears that this private development will effectively become a car-dependent gated community, an affluent yuppie outpost, with one road in and one road out, detached from the life of the city. "What killed the dream for me was an architect who talked of sitting in a chic cafe in the finished project, sipping on his frappuccino. I'm sorry, but that sounds like a bourgeois nightmare to me. Where's the friction, the intensity, the clang of ideas? There's always the danger that our new city will become overly smug about its sudden prosperity," said Belfast broadcaster Stuart Bailie in 2007, reacting to TitanicQuarter plans.
Considering the project today, novelist Glenn Patterson says, "it's a bit more TitanicSixteenth than TitanicQuarter at the moment. All these other aspirations are dependent on future funding. The problem I have with projects like this is the way they are sold to us as though they are the only show in town. Look at what's happening on the other side of the river, in the Cathedral Quarter, it's been re-energised in a more organic way. We need to not neglect other developments taking place in the city."
Given that Titanicis a powerful symbol of disaster and misplaced hubris, some people are uncomfortable with the enthusiastic embrace of "brand Titanic" by the marketers and developers. Whether TitanicQuarter is a similar shipwreck of dreams or a triumphant boost to the city's fortunes remains to be seen.