Last week The Dock Walkers stood beside the almost-finished Belfast Metropolitan College (or the L AS M as it was at that stage), looked from a distance through security gates and fences at the activity of a construction site.   They were working to a tight deadline – last Friday was the day the building was due to be handed over from the builders to the college authorities…

They made it!  So for the first time ever the Dock Walkers got to go right around the outside of the building – the front facing the Queens Road and the Arc Apartments, the rear looking over (and reflecting) Samson and Goliath.

We got to peer in through windows and see all the new equipment just ready to be unboxed – huge, impressive deskloads of computing stuff and catering gizmos waiting to spring into action for the first time.

We got to see how the clever design of the campus forms a huge outer square around an inner courtyard, with ‘shop fronts’ facing out onto the public space so that students can show off their new skills (I’m looking forward to getting my first TQ haircut)…

It’s yet another sign of the huge momentum of the TQ.  When I became the Dock Chaplain, the whole place was a tarpaulin-covered metal skeleton.  It’s just so exciting to see vision becoming reality on a daily basis all around me.