Queen's Parade: Start date confirmed for decades-delayed £60m Bangor revamp, with whole project to be finished by late summer 2028

A massive project to transform Queen’s Parade on the shoreline of the seaside Co Down city will get under way within weeks, with a Department for Communities (DfC) official confirming construction should begin on June 30.

This afternoon (3rd) final legal agreements allowing the building work to start were signed at Stormont, and officials stated the entire project should be built by late summer 2028.

Inking the deal with developers Bangor Marine and the local council, Communities Minister Gordon Lyons said: “After years of expectation, this scheme will be transformational for Bangor.”

Starting this month, the first phase will see a large seafront car park demolished to make way for a new pedestrian-friendly area with green lawns, an event space, a children’s play area, and food and drink kiosks.

Beginning in October this year, the second phase will construct apartments on the main body of the site, with work on retail and office space to start in May next year, followed by the final phase – a cinema and tourist draw ‘destination building’, plus more apartments – in January 2027.

A senior DfC official said that due to the size of the project, it’s possible those dates may slip slightly, but he remained hopeful they should be broadly reached.

Asked if the June 30 start date could definitely be met, he told the News Letter: “There are no impediments now. All the legal agreements, all the permissions, have been reached. My level of confidence would be in the high nineties, if not 100%.”

Developer Bangor Marine, a conglomerate involving Northern Ireland construction giant the Karl Group and Oakland Holdings, is lining up £50m of private sector investment for the scheme, while another £10m comes from the UK government’s Levelling Up Fund.

The DfC stated it will have oversight of the project, and it’s known the local council is eyeing the office space as potential new headquarters.

Bangor mayor Alistair Cathcart said that while signing the legal agreement is “an important and positive milestone to recognise”, he and many city residents “will only be fully satisfied when there are diggers on site”.

“Bangor Marine contractors need some time to mobilise, but I will be pushing for that work to start as soon as possible,” he stated. “Bangor has been waiting for this for a long time.”

Said Bangor Marine’s Aran Blackbourne: “We are delighted that all the legal documents are now agreed and we can now confidently move forward with the redevelopment project.”

UK Minister for Local Growth, Alex Norris, said: “I’m sure local residents and visitors will welcome this regeneration of Bangor that will boost growth across the region.”

A revamp of Queen’s Parade has been on the cards since the 1990s, and buildings on Bangor’s main seafront were demolished in the early years of this century to make way for it.

Supposed to be a jewel in the crown that would save the struggling centre of the Co Down seafront city, instead it’s been a thorn in the side of locals. Despite many different designs and ideas over the decades, little has been done with the site

Delays continued, with false start after false start as ideas came and went for the derelict site – which at one point was voted Northern Ireland’s biggest eyesore in a TV poll.

Eventually Stormont stepped in, buying the land. Including the purchase price, the DfC has spent £10m on Queen’s Parade since 2013, much of which involves maintenance costs.

In 2019, Bangor Marine were appointed as the chosen developer, but their design was held up for more than a year by protracted planning wrangling with a Stormont department.

Officials in the Department for Infrastructure’s Rivers section refused to sign off on the plans due to fears over flooding – not from the sea next to the site, but from a reservoir around three miles away.

Rivers officials worried that if the reservoir catastrophically burst its banks, part of the site’s car park could be hit.

Eventually officials decided they didn’t need to give their verdict on flooding and the scheme was finally given a green light, only to be hit with more delays from protracted negotiations getting a lease from the Crown Estate, which owns part of the seafront phase one is to be built on. Those issues are now understood to be fully sorted out, leaving the door open for construction to start.