In 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, together with Mr. Edward James Harland born during the year 1831, established the business. During the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
Once Harland bought Hickson's shipyard, he then made his assistant Wolff a partner in the business. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff was the nephew of Gustav Schwabe of Hamburg. He has invested mainly in the Bibby Line. The initial 3 ships which were made by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. One of his famous ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Moreover, he was able to increase the capacity of the ship by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The business eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding industry causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They chose to concentrate more on structural engineering and design and less on building ships. The company also diversified into the areas of offshore construction projects, ship repair as well as competing for more projects that had to do with metal engineering or construction.
These other interests led to Harland and Wolff building a series of bridges in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges consist of the restoration of Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge and the James Joyce Bridge. In the 1980s, their first venture into the civil engineering sector took place with the construction of the Foyle Bridge.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding job of Harland and Wolff to date. This was amongst six near identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed to be used by the Ministry of Defense. In the year 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.