Getting through the gate
I started working at Harland & Wolff the week the UK went into lockdown, in March 2020.
That’s not the detail I expected to lead with, but looking back, it’s the one that says the most about what this kind of work involves. A shipyard doesn’t stop needing documentation because the rest of the country has. The first jobs were straightforward: images of vessels in dry dock for case studies, and portraits of the yard manager at the time for press releases. Nothing dramatic. But it was the start of a working relationship that has now run for more than six years, across a change of ownership and a complete shift in what the yard builds.
Getting onto the site starts with a formal Health & Safety induction, the same as anyone else working there. What’s harder to explain is what that induction represents: a live site with cranes moving, vessels being worked on, and genuine safety risk everywhere you might want to point a camera. Access isn’t a box ticking exercise. It’s working around live operations, wearing the right PPE without being told twice, and knowing when to wait rather than get the shot, every visit. The drone work adds another layer again: restricted airspace over an active site needs its own clearance, which I’ve written about separately, flying a drone in restricted airspace.
Prime Ministers and a royal visit
That level of access has, at points, gone well beyond a standard site induction. I’ve photographed a serving Prime Minister on two separate occasions: Boris Johnson at the reopening of Harland & Wolff’s Appledore yard in August 2020, and Rishi Sunak’s visit to Belfast in December 2022, following the announcement that the Team Resolute consortium had won the Fleet Solid Support competition. In May 2021, I also photographed Prince Charles (now King Charles III) unveiling a plaque for the Belfast yard’s 160th anniversary, in the same spot where his late father Prince Philip had stood during a visit in 1977. Being trusted with that kind of access, on that kind of occasion, across two sites and three separate years, is a different order of vetting altogether.
A change of owner
In January 2025, the Spanish shipbuilder Navantia acquired Harland & Wolff’s four UK yards, forming Navantia UK. A new international owner, taking on a site about to become central to a major defence programme, had every reason to bring in its own people.
They didn’t. The relationship carried over.
Resurgent Hall
The clearest sign of where the yard is heading came with the opening of Resurgent Hall, which I photographed. Defence minister Luke Pollard opened the hall, adding 5,000 square metres of fabrication space for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s new support ships. It brings robotic plasma cutting equipment, refurbished cranes and a new mechanised panel line, and it’s the centrepiece of a £157 million investment programme across Navantia UK’s four shipyards. This is where the steel for RFA Resurgent, RFA Reliant and RFA Resourceful will be fabricated: ships that will supply ammunition, stores and provisions to Royal Navy vessels and carrier strike groups. Alongside it, Samson and Goliath, the two yellow cranes that dominate the Belfast docks, are being refurbished.
When I first went through the gate in 2020, I was photographing vessels in for ship repair. Six years on, I was there with a camera as the same yard opened the hall that will build ships for the Royal Navy’s support fleet. That’s not a job you get handed. It’s one you earn, visit by visit.
That’s really what six years at a site like this teaches you. The photography itself is a skill built over time: natural light inside a dry dock, working safely around moving gantry cranes, finding a useful angle on a hull the size of a building. But what keeps a photographer coming back to a site like Harland & Wolff isn’t the photography. It’s being someone the site trusts enough to keep letting in, shift after shift, year after year, regardless of who’s signing the cheques.
If you’re planning industrial photography on a site with real access and safety requirements, whether that’s a working yard, a live construction project or a restricted facility, I’d be glad to talk through what that involves.
Sources: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/navantia-uk-opens-new-belfast-hall-for-support-ship-build/
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-belfast-fabrication-hall-to-support-shipbuilding-for-decades
