The Dock is about to be joined by another new neighbour just down the road in Titanic Quarter…
It’s great to see another empty building in the TQ find an imaginative new use… The old bank is a little piece of shipyard history, and many people who worked in the yard can remember calling by to collect their pay-packets every Friday. For the last few years it’s been looking a little forlorn – but not for much longer once it’s fitted-out as a 45-seater restaurant with a charcoal pit and outside seating.
It’s been fun watching from the tram over the past few days as the work has started – I took a few pictures of what it looks like now, as the pace of change in TQ can sometimes happen so fast that it’s hard to remember what things used to look like!
So a massive welcome to Niall and the James St South crew from the Dock gang. They join the long (and growing) list of people who look at the empty spaces and buildings of Titanic Quarter and start to dream, and build, and create…
And I love that so many of the ideas that have started to flourish in those spaces are so left-field and quirky. An old bank becomes a restaurant. A paint hall becomes a movie studio. Drawing Offices become a hotel. An industrial shed becomes a skate park. Empty retail units become an Honesty Box Cafe and a funky home-made market.
I don’t think any of those transformations were in the original masterplan for Titanic Quarter – but that visionary plan seems to have itself inspired a place where creativity, imagination and courage are enabled. And so the new ideas seem to just keep coming…