Belfast City: Mud, Sweat and 400 Years

This is what they call a rescue sack.

It will give you about ten minutes of air. It's just a safety precaution.

-Pull it off.

-Pull it off, put the mask on, breathe in, get out.

And get out.

Happy?

Coming down.

I'm 12 feet below Belfast High Street.

This is where the River Farset comes down off the hills.

When the tide comes in, it will come up from the Lagan

and it will be above my head.

I've got all the bustling streets of Belfast above me,

but you can see the sea meets river down here.

You can even see little barnacles.

400 years ago, this was where modern Belfast was born.

Belfast started life as a river settlement on the edge

of the Lagan estuary.

In many ways, it still is.

The estuary became Belfast Harbour,

and it's an area that's fascinated me since I was a child.

We drove along this way every week from Bangor

to visit family in Belfast.

Just how did this estuary help Belfast

grow into an industrial powerhouse?

We think it took over ten years for the men to

dig about 600mm of material.

Whoa, that's two feet.

What kind of people moulded this pool of mud into all this?

Were they doing it for themselves or were they doing it for Belfast?

A bit of both.

It's two o'clock in the morning, and high tide.

In Belfast Harbour, just like hundreds of years ago,

a pilot boat is on its way to meat a coal ship.

Today, the ship in question is the Maritime Champion...

..a 180-metre-long bulk carrier that's bringing the equivalent

of over six million sacks of coal to Belfast from Long Beach California.

-How far out are we going?

-We'll be going about eight miles out

into Belfast Loch.

The actual captain, has he been to Belfast before?

No, that's why we're going out there. He's never been here before.

He can't know all the ports in the world.

We go out there, we've got a lot of knowledge about this port,

where to do certain manoeuvres and all the rest.

We've got the ship handling skills that we've got. We can get them in.

Put them alongside.

How do you actually get on to the ship? It's a big, old ship.

Well, they put a pilot ladder over.

-Which is basically a rope ladder.

-A rope ladder.

-Yeah.

Dedicated marine pilots have been working on the harbour

for over two centuries.

Watching Dougie this morning,

I don't think the way they get onto the boats has changed one bit.

Thank goodness it's a lovely calm day.

Imagine doing that in a force eight gale!

On Stormont Wharf, waiting for the ship are the linesmen.

HE SIGHS

What's that about?

Well, the lines have to be heavy enough, don't they?

Aye, we'll have to hold that ship.

HE LAUGHS

while most of us are tucked up in bed, people are working really hard

to bring ashore all the materials we need for our modern lifestyle.

What I really like about this is

nothing's really changed. There's nothing new.

All right, it used to be wooden ships and small loads,

but it's still the same process.

The port is our connection to the outside world.

It's now 6.30, and up from Stormont Wharf at Victoria Terminal 2,

the overnight ferry from Liverpool has just arrived.

The rest of the port is getting ready to begin another day.

Wind at the moment is currently northwest at nine knots.

It's been pretty much like that the whole night.

OK, can we go through what everybody's doing today?

-Mark, facilities.

-Yes, we are crew ship preparation.

Just looking for berth availability for getting in there

and cleaning Stormont Square.

Just an update on the shipping.

Whilst we have the Crystal Serenity coming tomorrow,

the Maritime Champion should complete today.

Let's be careful out there.

OTHERS: Thanks, Mark.

At a glass workshop in Lisburn,

artist Anne Smith is finishing the final

sketches for a stained-glass window that's been commissioned

by the harbour to celebrate Belfast's 400th anniversary.

It's a remarkable journey that started where the Lagan meets

the Farset, here in High Street.

400 years ago, a small river settlement of around 200

people was granted a royal charter of incorporation.

Belfast was now officially a town and a port.

Up here you can really imagine where it all began.

The Farset's coming down High Street at high tide,

all of this area is filling up with water so that ships can come

and load and unload, never mind the pavements down there,

they're quaysides.

There's bars, there's merchants at the side.

There's a real bustle here. People are meeting from all over the world.

Although Belfast might have taken its first few steps 400 years ago,

it came of age in the 19th century.

An industrial powerhouse that celebrated its dominance with

the construction of City Hall.

What I want to find out is how Belfast travelled

so far in such a short time.

Archaeologist Ruairi O Baoill has agreed

to take me right back to the start

with the 1613 Royal Charter, granted by King James I.

Arthur Chichester, who was Lord Deputy,

was awarded Belfast in 1604

as one of the spoils of war after the Gaelic Lords had been defeated.

Can I just confirm that? Sir Arthur Chichester, it was his.

-It was his.

-So democracy wasn't part of the game here?

No, it was one of the spoils of war after the nine-year war

where the Gaelic Lords were defeated.

Chichester was given various lands and he was given Belfast,

which in the medieval period had belonged to the Clandeboye O'Neills.

He was granted Belfast in 1604.

We know he set up a market in 1605 and a fair in 1608,

and that there were English, Scots and Manx people living there

and that Chichester was building a castle for himself.

What exactly is the Belfast Town Charter?

Well, this charter set up the provisions for a corporation

to run the new town that Chichester built,

and it also set up provision for a port.

Is the charter still important to Belfast today?

I think it is, because the work that Belfast City Council and the Harbour Commissioners

do today, the seeds and the provisions for that were

actually specified in the 1613 Charter.

The seeds of modern Belfast may have been sewn in the 17th century.

But the story really begins much before that at a very

specific point on the River Lagan.

The reason that Belfast arose as a settlement was there was

a crossing point or a ford,

probably a couple of hundred metres down from what the modern bridge is.

A couple hundred metres? Hold on, we're nearly there.

Somewhere around here.

-Just about this area.

-Yes.

You see, the settlement grew up because of the ford.

Timescales for that?

Timescales. Well, the earliest references to a ford and to Belfast

are to the 660s in the Irish histories where there was

a battle at the river.

-Sorry?

-666.

-No, we're talking seventh century?

-Yes.

That's not the 1613 charter timescale, this is much earlier.

No, but there is still the importance of the ford.

In fact, Belfast is known as Le Ford, The Ford, up to about the 1500s.

It gets its name Belfast from about 1500 onwards.

Take me through the map. What are we actually seeing here?

This is Belfast Loch around 1570.

You can see that Carrickfergus

is still the main port and the main town. It had the castle, etc.

Belfast is shown as just simply a castle.

For me that's really interesting because today you come

and visit Belfast - huge.

It's our city. It's our city.

Carrickfergus just at the end of the loch there,

it's got a nice old castle, it's very quaint.

-Complete reversal.

-Absolutely.

Well, the picture changed with the coming of Arthur Chichester

and the re-founding of the town in the early 17th century, the charter.

-This is the first map of Belfast.

-You can actually recognise streets here.

-They still exist.

-Absolutely.

You can see ships coming into High Street.

High Street wasn't covered over until the 1770s.

We can see the starts of the building of the Long Bridge.

Long Bridge was completed by the end of the 17th century.

It spanned nearly a kilometre and stood for almost 150 years

when it was replaced by the wider, shorter Queen's Bridge.

The construction of Long Bridge meant any port of Belfast

would always be downstream in the sprawling Lagan Estuary.

To get an idea of what building a port here might entail,

I need to get a higher vantage point,

so Robert Childs has agreed to take me up Goliath, one of Harland

and Wolff's iconic gantry cranes.

I came down here as an electrical apprentice.

Served four years in the training centre.

From there I progressed out into the electrical drawing office.

-What age did you arrive at?

-16.

16 you decided you'd come an work here, yeah? Family tradition?

Oh, absolutely.

No, my father,

in fact my mother as well worked here in the canteen for a while.

I've had generations of grandfathers, great grandfathers.

I'm looking at where you work.

I think I would wet myself if I had to go down that yellow chute

and hang out over the edge.

First time you did it, what did you think?

Em, absolutely apprehensive, of course.

I think once you start concentrating on the job,

you basically lose touch with where you are.

You're so focused on what has to be done on the ground.

You're listening very carefully to the commands you're

getting from the rigging crew.

So the height soon becomes irrelevant.

I mean, for 90% of the time, it's fine.

We do get the occasional emergency stop

and it does get pretty violent, I have to say that.

You do get thrown about the bubble.

Yeah. It's quite funny.

I'm having a chat with you, I keep looking over my shoulder thinking,

"Robert lives in the little red bit at the end there."

Goliath's task today is to lift the roof of a temporary painting shed.

While Robert gets busy with that,

I've come up Goliath's younger sibling Sampson.

A bit further up the yard, it gives a wider view of the harbour.

You get a real feel for the estuary when you're up here.

If I follow the road around, I can see the high land on one side,

down here the Sydenham Bypass. They're bounding the estuary.

There would have been nothing here. Sand, mud banks.

The Lagan meandering through.

Even the land this crane's on, it's been reclaimed from the sea.

By the end of the 17th century,

most of what was to become Belfast Harbour did not exist.

At low tide, you would still have been able to see

the shape of the meandering Lagan.

At high tide, small ships navigated the river to

unload their goods at quays constructed in High Street.

Slightly further upstream, Long Bridge provided a reliable

crossing point between County Down and County Antrim.

It's midday.

On the tip of Queen's Island, scrap metal from Dublin is being

unloaded and graded before being sent on to Europe.

Across on the Antrim side of the dock,

a paper shipment has arrived from Canada.

It'll be used in newspapers across Ireland.

From the Cork Courier to the Derry Journal.

One scrape will pay havoc with the printing presses,

so all the unloaded equipment is pressure controlled.

Mark, we'll just do a wee patrol round here then,

see if we can see any sign of this vehicle, over.

Over on Sydenham Road, a traffic incident has been reported.

The Harbour Police were established in 1847 to keep law

and order in an area that could get pretty lively.

They had the same power as any other force, although their

jurisdiction is still no more than one mile from the harbour boundary.

We've the same powers as the PSNI do,

it's just a localised area of the harbour.

There wasn't so many people lived on the harbour.

Now there's a lot of people live on the harbour,

a lot of visitors, a lot of tourists,

which has completely changed the dynamic of what we do.

From what we used to. We used to just deal with boats and sailors,

things like that. Stowaways.

Now it's all more commercial policing.

Two floors up from the police station is VTS,

the control centre for the port.

I'm with Richard Bates.

I'm hoping to find out how a modern port deals with

the logistics of handling over 5,000 ships a year.

The traffic information? Nothing outward at this time to affect you.

The weather within the port - wind, north-easterly, maximum three knots.

He's going to Gotto Wharf, south. This is Gotto Wharf here.

He's just been to the south end of this vessel for the stevedores to

work the cargo.

Put in the wrong place, it's a bit embarrassing, isn't it?

Yes, it would be. It would be a bit.

HE LAUGHS

You've been here seven years now. What about the changes?

What have you seen with those changes the last seven years?

Massive changes in the port. The port's developing all the time.

One of the biggest developments we've had the approach channel

and the inner harbour have been dredged.

It allows us now to bring in deep-drafted vessels.

-Bigger.

-Yeah, bigger ships.

Generally, shipping wise, things have got quite busy.

I wonder how today's harbour compares with the town centre

docks of the 18th century.

The population of Belfast had now risen to nearly 9,000.

It had also replaced Carrickfergus as the most important

port in Ulster.

Dr Jonathan Wright is a research fellow at Queen's University.

He's agreed to take me through the town's links

with the rest of the world.

Jonathan, I've got a list here of the imports

and exports out of Belfast in the last month or so. Quite interesting.

Lots of fuel coming in. We've got wine and sugar as well.

We're also bringing in grains and feed and coal.

We've got our exports, we've got scrap metal going out,

we've got stone going out.

How's that compare to the 18th century?

In some respects, it's quite similar.

In the 1780s, the Duke of Rutland described Belfast's

merchants as having a trade that was immense.

They were importing all sorts of things -

timber was coming from the Baltic region.

You had timber coming in as well.

You have tobacco, you have flax seed coming from North America.

Sugar and rum coming from the West Indies.

So a lot of similarities with the list from today.

The actual mainstay of the trade, what was the mainstay?

What kept Belfast turning over?

What really kept Belfast turning over in terms of its output was linen.

Linen was Belfast's major export.

Also then the provisions trade as well for the West Indies.

You've got salt fish going out,

you've got shoes being sent out for slaves on slave plantations.

Hold on, hang on a minute, we may not have been dealing in slaves,

but money that built Belfast did come from the slave trade.

Very much so. You don't need to trade or sell slaves

to make money off the back of slavery.

Belfast is a prime example of that.

It's also an example of some of the paradox involved in that.

You have radicals in Belfast who oppose slavery,

but are making money off trades that are linked to slavery.

A mile or so away from the harbour,

is the First Presbyterian Church of Belfast.

In the 18th century,

its congregation was full of the town's biggest movers and shakers.

Who am I here to meet?

The man in this memorial is William Tennent, who,

when he died in 1832 was one of the richest men in Belfast.

And he's a man who exemplifies how hard working and active Belfast's

mercantile community in the late 18th and early 19th century was.

Was Tennent born a wealthy man?

No, he wasn't always successful.

He was a man from very humble origins.

He was the son of a clergyman from County Antrim

and he started off in the Belfast Sugar House and he worked his way up.

He was a strong-willed man, a hard-working man,

a somewhat unusual man - he had a very unconventional private life.

He had 13 illegitimate children before he had his first

legitimate child.

Illegitimate children in the late 18th, early 19th century,

surely society would have shunned him.

One would think so, but he appears not to have been.

And Belfast of the time, what was the economic climate like?

In the late 18th century, Belfast was a town where there were

opportunities for ambitious young men to make money, certainly,

and William Tennent, grabbed them with both hands.

The 18th century might have offered

opportunities for merchants like Tennent,

but in the harbour, new berth and deeper channels were badly needed.

In 1795, the chamber of commerce was given permission to set up

the Ballast Board.

In 1847, it was replaced by the Harbour Commission,

and they're still responsible for running the port.

Today, it's the monthly board meeting,

and the chairman is Dr Len O'Hagan.

So what's on the agenda today?

-It's a very busy port.

-Absolutely.

And with 68% of all trade in Northern Ireland,

it's very important we keep our finger on the pulse.

So a lot of investment decisions to be made, at most board meetings.

The current harbour office was built in the Victorian era.

Everywhere you look,

you get the sense that this was a building where important

people met, and where the wealth of Belfast was created and enjoyed.

You must feel the history of all the people who have gone before you,

because all of the harbour and port is about people, isn't it?

Very much so, and every chairman has his portrait painted.

So, you have them all around the place and, you see,

these are the people who really built Belfast

because the port and the city are symbiotic.

So you're really part of a tradition.

I'm just passing through, the board is just passing through,

so we've got to leave something behind that is better than what

we actually inherited.

And that's, really, I think

what's important about this Belfast Harbour Commission and the board.

All the archives here, maps, all kinds of things...

Journalist and historian Alf McCreary has spent

years in the Harbour Commission's archives,

unpicking the history of the harbour.

..marvellous plans of the harbour in various stages.

Among the treasures he's found

are the record of the Ballast Board's first ever meeting.

And the minutes have got attendees here, and

"unanimously agreed and resolved," they're going to have a common seal.

It's going to be made of steel, about the size of a crown.

In the middle, there's going to be a ship, the words "Belfast"

are on it, they got together and they approved their logo.

Ladies and gentlemen, the board meeting shall now commence.

Thank you very much.

If you'd like to come through.

The original harbour commissioners, the Ballast Board,

-what sort of people were they?

-They were old men, for a start.

That's the time, isn't it? That's the era.

They were very important people, they were movers and shakers,

they were businessmen, merchant ship owners.

They saw a land-locked harbour, which they wanted to improve.

And when they were doing it,

were they doing it for themselves or were they doing it for Belfast?

A bit of both.

They wanted to make money, they wanted to make profit,

but because they were so good at what they did,

they opened up the harbour, which helped Belfast.

So there's a kind of symmetry about these people, that they saw their

destiny in a bigger, richer harbour and they were part of that destiny.

The first major problem tackled by the Ballast Board is

the same issue that has faced every generation of the harbour

since the 18th century -

how do you mould a modern port out of the shallow Lagan Estuary?

It's a battle against nature, that's created deeper channels

and an estate that is now one fifth of the city of Belfast.

Port engineer Eugene McBride has agreed to explain how they did it.

A natural harbour would naturally be very deep - deep walls,

deep water depth.

Belfast is more of a saucer shape.

Very shallow, which means, turning it into a harbour -

lot of work to be done.

An awful lot of work dredging out the material from the seabed to

deepen that channel to get the ships in.

What am I digging up here, Eugene?

You're digging up all the sediments and all the marine shells

and all the materials that accumulates in the Belfast Lough.

If I want a channel out there, 200 metres wide, 11 metres deep,

how long does it take to dig that?

200 years ago, that would have been virtually impossible.

For example, we think it took over ten years for the men to dig

about 600mm of material.

That's two feet.

That's only two feet in ten years, yes.

Would they really have done it by hand?

Everything would have been by hand, yes.

They might have used horses to pull drag lines on the shore.

Drag lines, you're talking about buckets

put out there and pulled back?

Big buckets or medium-sized buckets with a chain or a rope

and they would have scooped the material out of the channel.

Look, all the water's come straight back in.

Yes, it would all collapse back in and basically their work was

never done - they would have to go back and do it again the next day.

Here I am, wasting my time a little bit, but this stuff, if I turn

this into reclaimed land, they just piled it up and stamped it down?

Just piled it up.

This stuff isn't that bad, there is

much worse material in Belfast Lough than this.

-What is that?

-That would be Belfast sleech.

Is that this goop? Sleech?

What do you mean by sleech? Is this safe to touch?

It is safe to touch, yeah.

Aye, having said that...

There's no way you're going to build on that.

No. It has very low bearing capacity.

Bearing capacity -

-how much weight you can put on it before it goes "squish".

-That's exactly true.

Right. OK. So we're reclaiming some land, and we throw our sleech...

There we go - big pile of sleech.

How are you going to build on that?

You just wouldn't dump it on the ground like that, Dick, you would

put stone grounds or a stone bond around it, to restrain the material.

I put stones, and these stones stop my sleech from moving out too much?

Is that the norm? And that's happened around the Lough itself?

And that continues to happen to this very day.

Looks quite good!

I'm reclaiming my own little bit of the Lough here.

It's still squidgy and I'm not building on that, Dick.

What do we have to do next then?

You have to surcharge that material, you have to put manners on it.

Manners? I like the idea of giving that sludginess some manners.

Well, manners, you pour a layer of stone on top of that,

and the weight of that material pushes the sleech down

and gives it manners.

Makes it nice and robust, gives it strength.

You know what I'm going to do?

-I'm going to put a building on it.

-Right.

You're braver than me.

That's pretty solid, you know,

considering we've only just built that.

That's pretty solid, isn't it?

Well, you've just demonstrated the technique

that we use to reclaim land.

By the end of the 18th century,

an extensive hand-dredging programme had removed the worst of the

sandbanks and deepened the approach to Belfast port by two feet.

The port itself was still situated around the mouth of the Farset.

The dock at the end of High Street had now been built up,

strengthened and renamed Chichester Quay.

Around the corner, William Ritchie, a shipbuilder from Scotland,

was establishing a shipyard on the Antrim side of the Lagan.

The Ballast Board invested heavily in ship repair

and building facilities,

this included graving dock number one and graving dock number two.

This is one of the graving docks

commissioned by the Ballast Board to try and encourage shipbuilder

William Ritchie to increase his operations here in Belfast.

It's nearly 200 years old, and I just love the simplicity of this.

You open the gates, you bring your ship in,

you prop it up against the side and then you pump the water out.

The facilities built by the Ballast Board encouraged Ritchie to stay,

and allowed his ship building business to grow.

It's a business model that's been repeated at the harbour's

latest facility, D1.

£50 million was spent to create a holding area

for equipment for offshore wind farms.

The biggest job was strengthening the berth and harbour floor,

ready for the project's two installation vessels.

This is the Pacific Orca,

it helps to install five wind turbines a week.

I'm looking at the Pacific Orca, and I haven't actually seen

a ship come into a harbour before and jacking itself up to load.

That's not a concept you see everywhere, is it?

It's not a concept you see everywhere. There's only a few of these vessels out there.

-It just jacks itself up...

-It just jacks itself up.

It tries every leg first, takes about half an hour to settle,

then all of a sudden it jacks up.

There's nothing normal about this -

the propellers aren't going the right way, what's going on?

The propellers are actually used to position the vessel.

It can position itself perfectly.

I suppose the accuracy of this is quite important cos in a wind farm,

you tend to want to put your turbines in the right place.

Exactly. But also, there's cables

and there's all sorts of other things in that particular wind farm.

And the positioning of the vessels and the foundations themselves,

it's an accurate business, yeah.

As you can see, the next load is already ready.

-That's the next cargo?

-That's the next cargo.

-Hasn't even left yet?

-Oh, yeah.

That's just to put a little pressure on the guys installing them.

Guys, your next load is already there. Get a move on.

DONG Energy have now signed up for a ten-year lease,

but matching facilities with business is not an easy job.

One of the people responsible for thinking about the port's

future is commercial director Joe O'Neill.

-This is the stone of Northern Ireland?

-Yes.

-What's so special about it?

It's got a particular polished surface value,

a high-resistance value, which means it's a very durable stone,

very appropriate for road building.

-It's not skiddy.

-It's not skiddy, yeah.

Technical phrase.

Today, we export over a million tonnes of that a year.

Joe's keen to show me another side of the port's recent history.

He's taking me to Gotto Wharf.

A few years ago, it was bursting at the seams,

today, it's like a ghost town.

OK. We're quite empty in here. What was in this warehouse?

Timber. Entirely filled with timber.

Inside here, the next four warehouses filled with timber,

-everything outside - timber as well.

-Where is it all?

-Gone.

It's down to a fifth of what it used to be in volume terms.

The downturn in the housing market - the construction market for new

houses just disappeared and our timber volumes disappeared.

This is not the first time something like this has happened.

In the 19th century,

the American Civil War caused a collapse in cotton imports.

Luckily, Belfast and the port were ready to fill the void with linen.

Whose responsibility is it to make decisions about the future

of the port?

The board - the Belfast Harbour Commissioners board.

We're a trust port, so we make a surplus rather than a profit.

We pay tax, like any other company,

and anything that's left after that is ploughed

back into the business, into the development of the business -

building new quays, building new terminals, building new wharfs, building roads.

When it comes time to make your decisions,

what do you use to base your decisions on?

Party scientifically informed, partly economically informed

and just in small part your gut feeling as to what

trades are going to have to be accommodated in the future.

It's now late afternoon.

In Lisburn, the stained-glass window that celebrates

the port's 400-year history is coming on.

Engineering is a prominent part of the design,

and it's still a big part of the port.

At Harland and Wolff,

they're working on a new type of wind turbine foundation.

They're hoping it will revolutionise the industry.

Up the road from Harland and Wolff is an RSPB reserve.

A few minutes ago there was an unusual discovery.

Hi, Chris. Have you indentified it for me?

I definitely think it's a wood sandpiper.

Most of these birds have been coming here for generation after

generation after generation.

Therefore, they've become habituated

with the noises that are around them.

We've got the airport to one side, the pipeline to the other

and we've got the Stena Line opposite us.

So there's always noise, it's not a peaceful, quiet place to work.

It's sort of a man-made accident cos it is reclaimed land, and as

it started to settle, it started to gather rainwater

and then the birds started to come and then it became a special place.

Across the harbour, there's a shipment of animal feed.

The stevedores are hoping to finish unloading in a few hours.

The general loading berth cranes are maintained by the port engineers.

One of the team is Grace Davitt, she came here from Dublin Airport.

I don't like sitting in an office, I like going around - you don't

know what you're doing from one day to the next.

Obviously the downside to that is in the winter you've no heating,

you're out in the freezing cold, up high in the cranes

and just out in the elements.

Yeah, but it's a good job all the same.

I'm just checking these here, so you can work away, OK.

I think initially when I started,

the boys were a bit shocked that a woman was coming into the workshops,

but they work well with me now and it's just, I'm part of the team.

While grain ships have been coming to the harbour for centuries,

in the last 20 years, smaller loads predominantly arrive in containers.

Watching them come on and off the boats is hypnotic,

an apparently perfect creation of order in a chaotic world.

If I was to say to you, that blue one on the top, what's in it,

could you actually work out what's in it?

I'd have to make a call, but, yeah, I could find out.

-Could you?

-Yeah.

-Go on.

Can you check a container for me?

GESU 3119.

Cheers. Bye.

It's 28.7 tonne of waste paper, destined for Euromax in Rotterdam.

The plastic and the cardboard will be separated and packed

and then sent, usually, to China.

Every year, Belfast handles over 19 million tonnes of cargo,

that's over ten tonnes per person living in Northern Ireland.

But all this could never have happened without a fundamental

decision made by the Ballast Board in the 1830s.

A decision that would transform the harbour

and make Belfast ready for the modern world.

First half of the 19th century, what were the issues with Belfast

developing into a big, successful port?

The restriction would have been this section of the channel.

You've got a pool here, which is relatively deep water and you've

got this meandering channel, which is restricted water depth.

What solution do we go for?

Well, this is the solution here.

An engineer looking at it, seeing this meandering river...

It's a civil engineer!

We don't like bends, we just get a straight one down the middle.

We've got a bendy river, just chop a line through the middle of it.

That's it, Dick, just chop a line through the middle of it

and take the bends out and deepen it.

I love the simplicity of that.

Nice, simple solution - dig a trench all the way to Belfast.

That's right.

The first and second cuts created a three-metre-deep channel,

ready to carry all the materials

needed to fuel industries like linen.

The river was also deepened between Queen's Bridge,

which has now replaced Long Bridge, and the start of the channel.

The old town docks round the end of High Street have been

filled in and Queen's Quay and Clarendon Docks have been created.

On the County Down side,

the spoil from Victoria Channel has created an island.

By the middle of the 19th century, it has been planted with trees.

It's already open to the public, with pleasure gardens,

bathing pools and Belfast's very own crystal palace,

modelled on the one in London.

Creating a deep channel may have transformed Belfast as a port, but

it's no good getting the big ships in

if you can't unload them quickly.

The success of Belfast as a port, is as much down to the stevedores

and dockers as it is to

those in the boardrooms at the Harbour Commissioner's Office.

This is a tough and dirty job, and it always has been.

The sheer scale of the operation here is what surprises me,

cos that's a big old crane.

Well, it is.

What you're finding is that ships are getting bigger.

As the demand for cheaper commodities, etc, is happening

you're finding that they're having to come in in larger parcels.

This particular vessel is 30,000 tonnes.

And what are we actually working...this is coal?

-It is a form of coal called petcoke.

-Coke?

-Petcoke.

How do they get it all out? How do you get in the corners?

We put in bobcats, so it's a combination of the bobcat

and the actual men with brushes and shovels.

Everything has to come out.

-Completely clean.

-Completely clean.

This vessel could be going for a cargo of grain back to

South America to load soya bean or something like that.

-So...

-100% spotless.

Many dockers come from families whose involvement in the port

goes back generations.

Brian Morgan is fourth generation.

His first day at the docks was 34 years ago.

Just as I was starting, I think,

a few years before there was no bobcats so all the coal had

to be shovelled out underneath on the inside.

So, you would have had maybe

10, 12 men shovelling out from dusk till dawn, you know.

The actual physical movement of whatever is in the hold to the

middle to be lifted up, all done by hand?

All done by hand and wheelbarrows.

If it went too far back, they'd put it in wheelbarrows,

wheeled it out into the middle of the hatch.

Of course, this port's built on men using their sweat

-and wheelbarrows and shovels, isn't it?

-It is indeed, yes, it is indeed.

You know and obviously with modernisation too, you know, the

number of men has been drastically cut, you know,

so now there wouldn't be half the men there was.

Four generations of family before you, Brian, what about the future?

I've actually, in the last few years,

I've got two of my nephews in and they're now stevedores, dockers.

So, they're fifth generation, my own son as well,

we'll see what happens, you know.

For hundreds of years, boats were unloaded by hand.

Traditionally, the men who did it lived close by in Sailortown.

I've come here with political historian Eamon Phoenix to try

and find out what being a docker might have been like.

Now, this is Sailortown but there isn't actually sailors here, is there?

Name goes back really, I suppose, to the 18th, early 19th century,

when this was a centre for immigration to the Untied States.

Sailors, mariners living here but by the 1860s, '70s,

it became a very closely knit,

working class community of really deep sea dockers.

It ran in the blood, it ran in the families.

We're on our way to the Dockers' Club to meet some men who began

working in the docks in the '40s and '50s.

Their memories echo the experience of dock workers that go back centuries.

There was tremendous tension always in a casual system at the docks.

In that there was long periods when there would be more men than jobs.

All sounds very casual,

I'm not hearing much of security of income or anything here, am I?

The information was only the bush telegraph.

There was no such thing as a board saying there's X, Y and Z here today.

You know, you come out in the morning time and you just spoke to people.

They told you they heard there was a boat there,

there wasn't a boat there.

Employers were at the docks when they required labour.

As soon as that was not a requirement, they were away.

Tell me the nature of the cargos you were dealing with.

What were the worst sort of things to be taking out of a hold?

Say fishmeal, a fishmeal boat, it stinks,

it's dreadful and you had to stand where the heaves come down.

Sometimes some of these heaves burst and stuff like that.

I was a delegate to a fishmeal boat

and a couple of days before that I had met a girl for the first time

and we had agreed to go out and I had to meet her at

the General Post Office in Royal Avenue at the time.

And as soon as I get up,

you could see the look of terror on her face

and she was looking all around to see where this smell was

coming from and we headed for the picture house

and she walked about 15 feet in front of me.

And when we came out of the picture house, she said, "Bye-bye."

I never saw her again.

But we were used to that, we were used to coming home

smelling of something or coming home covered in something.

You just got on with it.

Belfast's economy was built on stevedores

and loading raw materials and loading up exports.

I'm wondering exactly what the activity in the port

was like in the second half of the 19th century,

when Belfast reached its industrial golden age.

Helping me make sense of the figures is historian Olwen Purdue.

1861, what have you got coming in in coal?

1861, coal, we have 412,000 tonnes.

412,000 tonnes. Come forward to the end of the century. What's this?

This is 1896.

1,160,000 tonnes. That's nearly four times as much.

That's a massive increase.

Huge increase over the second half of the century. Why was that?

Well, the coal was being used to fuel the industries that were

growing in Belfast at this time.

This was a period when industries were springing up all over

the place. We had a massive growth in linen, for example.

-OK and how much linen are we talking about?

-OK.

What have you got back in the 1860s?

-OK, so in 1861 we had 57,000 packages.

-Packages?

Right, well, cos at the end of the century we've got 44,000 tonnes.

-That's an awful lot of linen going out.

-Massive growth.

-What's caused the growth in linen?

-Linen had always been around.

People had been producing linen in particular

the north of Ireland for many years but very much in a domestic scale.

What we see in the 19th century is it moving from the domestic

scale to being large, industrial scale

and what really was happening was that people were, entrepreneurs

in particular, developing ways of producing linen in factories.

I'm loving these books by the way.

The amount of information we've got here.

We imported 5 hundredweight, that's 40 stone of tortoises!

Yeah, what do you do with 40 stone of tortoises?

And we've got cigars, we've got brandy.

We've even got exotic things like rice, which really surprises me.

We've got people dealing in lemons and lentils.

You know, we've got hare coming in.

It must have been a really entrepreneurial feel about Belfast.

I think there was.

You get the real impression that it was a city on the rise,

that it was boom time but the other side of the city

and the other side of the growth of the city at this stage was

also that there was a tremendous amount of poverty.

Not everybody was successful.

If you couldn't work, if you were injured, if you were a woman and you

got pregnant and you weren't able to work,

then very often the workhouse was the only solution.

By 1900, almost 300 years from its charter,

Belfast had become bigger than Dublin.

Its population was now over 350,000.

The city was also famous enough to attract the world's leading

film-makers, the Lumiere brothers, who came here in 1897.

The harbour had also grown.

At the turn of the century,

the High Street docks have now completely disappeared.

New quays further downstream on the Antrim side of the Lagan are now

receiving the raw materials needed for the booming local industries.

Victoria Channel has also been extended and there's a new Musgrave Channel

behind Queen's Island on the Down side of the harbour.

On Queen's Island itself,

the Crystal Palace destroyed by fire has never been replaced.

Iron shipyards, first established on the island in the 1850s,

have now gobbled up all available space.

When it was built,

Alexander Dock was the longest dry dock in the world.

But in 1911, the Harbour Commission went one better.

This is Thompson Graving Dock,

built by the harbour to be large enough for a new

generation of passenger ships, commissioned by the White Star Line.

It's where Olympic and Titanic were completed

and although they represent the pinnacle of Belfast shipbuilding,

to me the dry dock where they were created is just as impressive.

If you have a look at this dock,

you get a feel for the size of the operation.

This was built in 1911.

850 feet long, it could be extended another 37 and a half feet.

It's 128 feet wide, 44 feet deep, holds 21 million gallons of water.

This is huge!

Today, the large ocean going pleasure ships that

dock in Belfast are built elsewhere but names like Olympic

and Titanic still ring out across the ages.

It wasn't just Harland and Wolff, the so-called "wee yard"

of Workman and Clark launched over 500 vessels in its 55 years.

For historian Eamon Phoenix,

though, the name that really rings out from this era is William Pirrie.

Chairman of Harland and Wolff

and a prominent member of the harbour board for 12 years.

We think of Harland and Wolff,

the two great founders of the shipyard in 1861,

when the channel was deepened

and raw materials were brought in from England and Scotland

but, of course, Pirrie arrived here as a gentleman apprentice

in the 1860s, aged about 15 years of age.

Though born in Canada, he was an Ulsterman by parentage.

He had a great aptitude for engineering, he had personal charm,

he had a sense of the role of Belfast shipyards in the world.

What, you say, you know, Harland and Wolff

and Pirrie in the same sentence.

Is he as important to you as Harland and Wolff?

He's probably more important, in that it was his, kind of, ideas

from the 1870s on that built up the firm and expanded the workforce to 30,000.

Right, I know I've got a real treat in store for you.

-We've actually got up in the boardroom Pirrie's book.

-Yes.

Before I let you see that,

I have got to go and talk to a man about some of this metal.

That is a thing of beauty,

-do you mind coming to have a quick peek at this.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-Because this is what we're all about.

-OK.

We're still making things.

-Now, I love it, what is it?

-These are suction bucket foundations.

What, what, what? What is a suction bucket foundation?

Basically, the bottom part of this is a large suction bucket.

It's innovative foundation for the offshore wind market.

When you bring them out to sea, they lower them into the water and at

the start they self-penetrate into the sea bed by their own weight.

So, it's a bit like being on the sand, wiggling your toes,

you get stuck in there.

Yeah, it's like being on the beach

and putting a bucket into the sand and trying to drag it back out.

That's what the whole concept works on.

-So, these are the first ones being made and they're in Belfast?

-Yes.

-How many are you going to make?

-Hopefully, up to 200 a year.

Good man!

I love the fact that Harland and Wolff

are still involved in innovative engineering.

It's something I'm sure Pirrie would have approved of.

Eamon, this book is absolutely gorgeous, isn't it?

Oh, I think it's totally unique.

-It's so much history in one document.

-Absolutely, it's all here.

And, of course, the Royal Victoria Hospital, pictured in the book,

which he and his wealth helped to found at the turn of the 20th century.

And you have at the end, of course, you have the new engines.

Look at the technology and the engineering that had

developed from the masted ships, you know, to the edge of Titanic.

It's a bit like "This Is Your Life", the big red book!

I think that sums it up very well.

I mean it really is a very personalised tribute to Pirrie on

his life's achievement but towards the end, we have Pirrie's reply.

Reply the Right Honourable, the Viscount Pirrie, read by his wife at

the function at which this book was presented and clearly added later.

And, of course, he talks about his love for Ireland,

his love for the city of Belfast

but he also reflects on the serious sectarian

and political troubles that were bubbling

away in the Belfast of 1922 and against that background

he writes, "Difficult problems abound, which can only be overcome

"With patience and common sense."

And he talks about conflicts of opinion.

These words are still right today, aren't they?

"We need common sense and patience."

People say it on the Six O'Clock News in Northern Ireland every night

and we're still trying to achieve it but Pirrie was saying it,

you know, nearly a century ago.

The First World War, followed by partition,

marked the start of a difficult period for Belfast.

During the Second World War, there was heavy bombing.

The harbour was the main target but the city was also badly damaged.

Despite the devastation, the production of warships

and aircraft for the British war effort helped cushion the effects

of a collapsing world economy and the harbour recovered quickly.

In the '60s,

films still celebrated the harbour's contribution to the wider world.

This shipbuilding yard, with its 18 building berths

and its huge marine engineering establishment is the largest

single shipyard in the world.

Wherever you go, you will find the spirit of youthful enterprise.

The harbour continued to grow and develop.

In the '30s the new Herdman Channel provided increased

access for ships on the Antrim side.

On the County Down side, a massive dredging and reclamation

programme created 365 acres of land on the Sydenham foreshore.

That's over 200 football pitches.

Some of this will provide the site for a new airport,

which was opened in 1938.

It's now 7.30 and the 6.40 flight from Edinburgh is

arriving at what's now known as George Best Belfast City Airport.

The airport handles over 100 flights a day.

Over at the harbour office, this stain glass window is being

installed, ready for an unveiling ceremony.

The window will provide a record of the harbour's finest achievements

and there's lots to be celebrated.

But in the archives, there are accident books

and they tell the other side of the story.

Mr Birch was struck in the face with a wench,

had his hand and lip cut but he continued working.

You come down, Samuel Jamieson was pulling a chain with a chain hook,

the hook slipped, he fell, injured his shoulder, unable to work.

And here, the one that I think just says it all, really.

"William Purse, deck hand, lost his life through drowning."

Looking at records like this makes you

aware of the thousands of people who made Belfast Harbour,

whose names we'll never know.

It also makes you realise

this is not a romantic story of human endeavour.

Jim, you all knew it was a dangerous job,

but you still wanted to do it.

Unemployment is a great discipline and, at the time

that I joined the union,

the prospects of other work were absolutely nil.

So, the lack of other work was a big factor in people

seeking to become employed at the docks.

I mean, the reason I went on the dock was my father had died,

there was five of us left.

I was 16 in 1952, November.

My uncle took me down.

The first job I got nearly killed me, nearly murdered me.

My back all broke out, scabs, open wounds.

And one Saturday morning the bed was covered in blood and my mum said,

"You're not going back there."

I said, "I have to go back. I have to."

"You're not going back." So, I went back to bed and about an hour later,

footsteps on the stairs, someone running up the stairs,

the bedroom door got smashed open, and it was my Uncle Davey.

"Never mind. Your back will heal. Get back down to your work.

"If you're going to start listening to your ladies you'll end up

"being a lady yourself.

"There's men down there doing your work. Get down."

So, I went down and, as he said, later on,

the back healed itself.

So, when I'd be out and I'd be dancing in the Plaza or

somewhere, and you held hands in those days,

the girl would say to you, "Where do you work?"

I'd have said, "At the docks."

She said, "Your hands are too soft. You couldn't work at the docks."

I said, "Do you want to see my back?" Leather.

LAUGHTER

It's the end of another day in Belfast.

At D1, the Pacific Orca,

is getting ready to sail to a wind farm just north of Blackpool.

Over at Stormont Quay, coal dust and grain are being cleaned from

the dockside, ready for the arrival of a cruise ship tomorrow morning.

Down at Titanic Quarter,

the police are carrying out their evening foot patrols.

While VTS remain vigilant, at the harbour office,

the great unveiling ceremony has begun.

APPLAUSE

It's absolutely fabulous to see the window installed

after about seven months working on it.

I feel it's like a celebration, really, of all the achievements

from people in Belfast to make the port what it is today.

While the Commissioners celebrate 400 years,

at the ferry terminals it's another busy night.

Victoria Terminal 4 has been open for just a few years.

It's built on the latest parcel of land reclaimed from the sea

less than ten years ago.

By the '60s, the harbour had firmly established roll on,

roll off services, with new ferry terminals built at Donegal Quay.

The SeaCat operated from here right up to 2005,

but the harbour was expanding its reach out to sea

and an area of reclaimed land to the north of the harbour would

eventually house a container terminal and two ferry terminals.

The plan for the future is to reclaim more

land on the end of VT4, extending the port's

reach beyond the estuary right out into Belfast Loch.

Over on Queen's Island, the collapse of shipbuilding in the

'70s have seen a return of leisure facilities to the island.

This year will also see the creation of new births for cruise ships.

RADIO CHATTER

It's 5.30 in the morning.

A cruise ship, the Crystal Serenity, has picked up its pilot.

Later today, it will host a reception, given by the harbour,

for politicians and businessmen to explain the need for the

multimillion pounds investment in a new cruise ship birth.

Before the VIP guests arrive, I'm getting my own sneaky look.

I wonder if the passengers ever give a thought to the remarkable

story of the port their sitting in.

It doesn't matter how much time I spend at the harbour,

the sheer of things coming in and out - very impressive.

And all of this activity and industry,

I'm just so amazed it's all carved out of a sand bar.

Think of the tens of thousands of people that have created this.

Respect.