During 1861, the company Harland and Wolff was formed. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg in 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born in the year 1831, established the business. During the year 1858 the general manager at the time, Harland, bought the small shipyard situated on Queen's Island. He bought the property from his employer, Richard Hickson.
Once Harland purchased 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 mostly in the Bibby Line. The initial 3 ships which were constructed by the brand new shipyard were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful undertaking. One of his well-known ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by using iron for the upper wodden decks. Furthermore, he was able to increase the ship's capacity 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 design and engineering and less on building ships. The business even diversified into the areas of offshore construction projects, ship repair and competing for more projects which had to do with metal engineering or construction.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, like a series of bridges to be constructed 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. During the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their initial venture into the civil engineering sector took place.
The MV Anvil Point was the last shipbuilding project of Harland and Wolff to date. This was one of six almost identical Point class sealift ships that was constructed for use by the Ministry of Defense. The ship was launched in 2003, after being constructed under license from Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft, shipbuilders from Germany.