During the year 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born in Hamburg during the year 1834, along with Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831, established the company. During 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He purchased the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
When Harland bought Hickson's shipyard, he then made his assistant Wolff a partner in the company. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff was the nephew of Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg. He has invested heavily in the Bibby Line. The first 3 ships which were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being innovative, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. Among his well-known suggestions was increasing the ship's overall strength by utilizing iron for the upper wodden decks. Also, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
Harland and Wolff were eventually faced with competitive pressures in regards to shipbuilding. They sought to shift their focus and broaden their portfolio. They chose to focus less on building ships and more on structural engineering and design. The company even diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects which had to do with construction and metal engineering.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff constructing a series of bridges in Britain and in the Republic of Ireland. These bridges include the restoration of both the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. In the 1980s, with the building of the Foyle Bridge, their first venture into the civil engineering sector occurred.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff to date. This was among six near identical Point class sealift ships that was built to be used by the Ministry of Defense. During the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.