The taxi ride from Belfast city centre to the Northern Ireland Science Park takes less than 15 minutes. But that quarter of an hour takes us through 100 years of Belfast’s past.
The taxi travels through streets with familiar names and landmark buildings into the hinterland, past boarded-up buildings, before arriving at the historic dockyards – once the largest shipyard in the world and the birthplace of the ill-fated RMS Titanic.
Passing beneath the dockyard’s famous towering yellow cranes of Harland & Wolff, we enter NISP. Belfast’s new industrial base is a cluster of gleaming glass, shiny metal and beech panelling, where pumps and cranes have been replaced by chips and gadgets.
NISP sits on the 24-acre Queen’s Island site, part of a regeneration project twice the size of Canary Wharf and less than 2 miles from Belfast city centre.
As it is also a 90-minute train ride from one of its affiliated universities, Ulster, and a textbook’s throw from the other, Queen’s University, it has become the first port of call for college spin-off companies looking for incubator space. Household names have joined fledgling companies, with Halifax, Citigroup and Microsoft signing up for space.
It has been five years since chancellor Gordon Brown pledged £10m as part of agovernment-backed economic package for Northern Ireland in the wake of the 1996 Good Friday agreement.
Now, 12 buildings, phased over five years, are planned for NISP. The first of these — the 60,000 sq ft Innovation Centre, split into units of 2,000 sq ft — is fully occupied, as is Queen’s University’s £40m Institute of Electronics, Communications & Information Technology research centre.
Construction has started on the four-storey, 40,000 sq ft White Star House, which is to provide 5,000 sq ft units for expanding firms. Work is expected to start on 24,000 sq ft of laboratories in the Legacy building, due for completion in September, and there are plans to start on three interconnected, phased buildings, which will provide a total of 50,000 sq ft.
Around 150 people now work on the site and, within five years, the government hopes to create 3,000 jobs – in line with targets to increase the contribution to GDP from research and development by 30%.
NISP is affecting R&D not only on the campuses but also in the city as a whole. But, while most of this has been beneficial, there have been some dissenting whispers. Cynics say Belfast has missed the hi-tech boat, pointing to a 10% vacancy rate in the Thames Valley and the high-profile failure of Dublin’s Media Lab Europe research institute (see box). Other commentators claim that NISP will harm the burgeoning city-centre market.
Local agents are generally positive, but a recent letting to Citigroup made them bristle. The bank set up in NISP as a stopgap before it moves to the park’s 40,000 sq ft technology centre in White Star House.
Ian Duddy, head of business space at Colliers CRE, says: “Citigroup was the sort of company that should have gone to Donegal Square in the city centre but, because of the reported incentives with the science park deal, it was too good to turn down.”
However, he concedes: “I think the science park is very much a positive thing and it is offering start-up companies favourable tenure terms with room for immediate expansion.”
Citigroup was not the only firm making NISP its first port of call. Microsoft has taken 4,000 sq ft of offices, with a view to expand into 12,000 sq ft over the next two years. “Broadly, it is good that they are attracting companies of this quality,” says Duddy.
He believes, as the park develops, both its environment and facilities will improve. As it does, incentives will be more on a parallel with those in the city centre. As a result, he says: “I don’t think it is damaging. There is room for both to co-exist and both can survive.”
City centre fears
That could prove true, but statistics from the UK Science Park Association show that, while 20% of science park occupiers come straight from local universities, nearly half come from firms within a five-mile radius of the park. If this applies to NISP, it could cast a shadow over Belfast’s city-centre market.
NISP director of corporate real estate and facilities Michael Graham dismisses this. “NISP is additive,” he says. “There is no point in us trying to compete with something being done in the city centre. The product does not exist there, or on the island for that matter.”
He points to rental levels of £20,000 pa (around £10 per sq ft), compared with £8-£10 per sq ft in the city centre. “We are not undercutting the city centre. You can see that the finish is functional and attractive, but it is not to the same level as a lot of the stock in the city centre,” he says. “We do have a lot of incentives, but we are not just providing space. It is about the whole lifestyle.”
Graham describes the lease terms as progressive, ranging from one month’s to five years’ notice. “It is more like the hotel view of property tenure to give flexibility. Most of the companies do not have the financial providence and can’t sign a long lease.”
Sitting in the beech-clad atrium, which has housed everything from Japanese bank seminars to the Titanic costume ball, it is easy to see what he means. Flexibility is built in, with sliding partition walls, screens on wheels and break-out areas.
“The building is designed to have agile space,” says Graham. “One extreme example is that we turned around space for an ICT operator in half a day, but we generally look to fit out in three to four weeks,” says Graham.
As firms expand out of incubator space and move to bigger units, new tenants will be brought in at higher rents, explains David Wright, associate partner at CB Richard Ellis Gunne. “We are not a cheaper option than the city centre, just different,” he says. “Deals signed in 2004 put rents in the Innovation Centre at around £10-£11 per sq ft, which is pretty much the same as in the city centre.”
Unfavourable comparisons with the Thames Valley also get short shrift. Graham says Belfast has the highest concentration of technology graduates in the UK. He adds that a combination of a good quality of life and a cheaper cost of living will be enough to keep drawing companies in.
Judging from the prelets scored so far, the strategy seems to be working. As Graham says: “Citigroup was a huge letting – plenty of city landlords would break arms for a prelet.”
|
Dublin’s hi-tech laboratory Media Lab Europe closed in a media storm this January. The brainchild of the Irish government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it failed to attract enough private cash to keep going. Against this backdrop, Michael Graham, director of corporate real estate and facilities at the Northern Ireland Science Park, hopes to attract private funding to the Belfast park. “I would question whether Dublin was really a science park,” says Graham. He subscribes to the definition that a science park must develop and encourage links with universities, higher education and research organisations. “The Media Lab didn’t have any links. There are too many examples of developers who have decided to brand their sites as science parks but in name alone,” he says. NISP has applied for £6m but Graham would like to see venture capitalists that are lending money to technology firms to invest in the real estate side as well. |
|
Northern Ireland Science Park Planning permission for 425,000 sq ft Built or under construction: 150,000 sq ft First letting: February 2004 Wireless broadband network Tier one internet capable of handling as much traffic as the whole of current capacity in Northern Ireland Nineteen fibre-optic cables carry traffic through three exchanges |
