The Belfast yard at Queen's Island still trades as Harland & Wolff and has been owned by Navantia UK since January 2025, when the Spanish state group's British arm bought the company together with its yards at Appledore, Methil and Arnish. It was founded in 1861 by Edward James Harland and Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, took the Harland & Wolff name in 1862, and grew from a 1.5 acre site into the yard that built the Olympic class liners, Olympic launched in 1910, Titanic in 1911 and Britannic in 1914. In the Second World War it turned out six aircraft carriers, two cruisers including HMS Belfast and 131 other ships, alongside modification and repair work on more than 22,000 vessels. Commercial newbuilding ended in 2003 with the MV Anvil Point. Belfast is now the centre of the Fleet Solid Support programme, a 1.6 billion pound Ministry of Defence contract awarded in January 2023 for three vessels for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
The site covers 81 acres with more than 300,000 square metres of hardstanding. The main building dock can be worked part wet and part dry: an intermediate gate assembled from six bolted sections can be set in four positions, including at the dock entrance in place of the main gate. Two Goliath gantry cranes span 140 metres over it, lifting 840 and 900 tonnes at 70 and 80 metres of height; Goliath was completed in 1969 and stands 96 metres tall, Samson in 1974 at 106 metres. Two 60 tonne and one 9 tonne dockside cranes work alongside them. The repair dock is served by two 40 tonne and one 80 tonne cranes, with 1,500 cubic metres of slops reception, a licence for open grit blasting and its own offices, amenities and workshops. Sea access is through the Victoria Channel, six miles long, at least 9.1 metres deep and 152.4 metres wide, with no locks, bridges or height restrictions and a 3.5 metre tidal range.
Covered fabrication runs to more than 30,000 square metres. The Musgrave blocking shop covers 8,976 square metres behind sliding doors 40 metres wide and 18 metres high; the Musgrave fabrication shop holds a 200 tonne growing line, six submerged-arc welding tractors and two four-wire manipulators; and the 5,096 square metre plate forming shop runs a two-axis CNC cutting machine, a plasma unit, a four-roll bending machine and presses of 700 and 100 tonnes. Structural steel throughput is 100 to 250 tonnes a week. More than 2,500 square metres of environmentally controlled blasting and painting cells sit beside the main dock, two of them semi-permanent halls at the dock head that work as one 70 metre hall or as two of 35 metres, loaded through removable roofs by gantry crane.
Work offered runs from naval architecture and structural and electrical design through fabrication and construction to planned and emergency repair of all vessel types, in-service support and conversion, from simple renewals to complex overhauls of ships and offshore platforms. Decommissioning is carried out in the Belfast drydocks, and the yard holds a waste management licence for the recycling of ships and offshore units to the Defra standard. Navantia UK's other yards take different work: Appledore, with a roof-covered drydock, has built more than 300 vessels and repairs them as well, while Methil and Arnish fabricate offshore wind structures.
