Location: Titanic Quarter, east Belfast, on Queen’s Island; a short road off Queen’s Road near Titanic Belfast (BT3 9EQ), on the site of the former Harland & Wolff North Yard.
Established:
Approved April 2012 by Belfast City Council. At a meeting of the Naming Committee on 16 April 2012, Titanic Quarter Ltd proposed:
“Arrol Way – Off Queen’s Road, BT3,”
which was accepted, along with Olympic Way, as part of the Titanic Quarter redevelopment.
Name origin:
Arrol Way is a commemorative name referring to Sir William Arrol & Co. of Glasgow, the engineering firm responsible for constructing the Arrol Gantry at Harland & Wolff. Erected c. 1907–08 over the enlarged slipways in the North Yard, the gantry was a vast steel framework (c. 840 ft long; c. 5,900–6,000 tons) designed to facilitate the construction of the Olympic-class liners — RMS Olympic, Titanic, and later Britannic.
The structure functioned as an overhead support and lifting system, enabling large sections of the ships to be assembled on the slipways. It remained in place until its dismantling in the late 1960s (completed c. 1969–70). The street name does not derive from any earlier roadway but commemorates this prominent industrial structure and its builders.
Description:
Arrol Way is a modern access road created as part of the Titanic Quarter redevelopment. It serves contemporary commercial and heritage uses adjacent to Titanic Belfast. The street has no pre-21st-century history and did not exist during the shipyard period.
Historical significance:
The name reflects Belfast’s shipbuilding zenith in the early 20th century. The Arrol Gantry was one of the most significant infrastructural works in the Harland & Wolff yard, facilitating the efficient simultaneous construction of large liners on adjacent slipways (Nos. 2 and 3).
Although Arrol Way itself is modern, its naming anchors the redeveloped area within the historic landscape of Queen’s Island, where the gantry dominated for over sixty years. The skyline is now defined instead by the later Harland & Wolff cranes Samson (1969) and Goliath (1974), which serve as the principal surviving visual symbols of the shipyard.
Context:
The name forms part of a coordinated thematic group within the Titanic Quarter, alongside Olympic Way and Titanic Boulevard, referencing ships, infrastructure, and engineering associated with Harland & Wolff and the Olympic-class liners. This naming scheme reflects the area’s redevelopment as a heritage-led urban quarter.
Belfast City Council, Naming Committee minutes (16 April 2012)
Belfast News-Letter, 1 August 1970 (report on dismantling of the Arrol Gantry)
McCluskie, Tom. Titanic and Her Sisters: Olympic and Britannic (London: Caxton, 1998)
Wilson, Brian. Shipbuilding in Belfast, 1636–1987 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987)