Tribeca Belfast: Safety barrier at derelict building an ‘absolute eyesore’

Plans to redevelop the area between the cathedral and Royal Avenue have made little progress in the last 20 years.

A retail-led scheme called Royal Exchange was first proposed by a different developer in 2006.

It was granted planning permission, but stalled because of the property crash.

Castlebrooke, which has owned the site since 2016, received planning permission in 2020 for an office-led redevelopment scheme.

But it has recently reworked its proposals to focus on housing, with a pre-application planning notice involving 1,000 new homes and two hotels.

Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) councillor Carl Whyte called for “urgent action” to address the “significant disruption” resulting from the derelict property and safety barrier.

He said that “Belfast is once again paying the price for the Tribeca fiasco”.

“The continued failure to redevelop these sites is not only holding Belfast back economically, it is actively damaging the city centre and the experience of those who live, work and visit here.”

Green Party councillor Áine Groogan said she was “concerned that almost a month on there has been no apparent progress on the site”.

She said that “landowners need to step up and protect the built heritage in their ownership once and for all”.

Groogan, who sits on the council’s planning committee, added that because the building was in a “conservation area” it cannot be “demolished without a demolition consent application”.

She said either the building “needs to be fixed” or otherwise “if it can’t be fixed, then we need to see evidence of that”.