Southern comfort

摘要

A cold wind drives over the Titanic's abandoned slipway, and nothing stirs where over 35,000 men hammered and cut in what was once the world's greatest shipyard. From here, past idle cranes and rusty railway tracks, Belfast looks bleak. Yet in a nearby office overlooking the Harland and Wolff shipyard stands an architect's model of the "Titanic Quarter", a proposal for a handsome complex of new apartments, offices and shops where ships used to be made. The surprise is not that Belfast is planning to redevelop its waterfront; cities from Cape Town to Los Angeles have done the same. It is that the £1.5 billion ($2.8 billion) investment is led by a company based in Dublin.