In 1861, the business Harland and Wolff was established. Mr. Gustav Wilhelm Wolff, born within Hamburg during the year 1834, and Mr. Edward James Harland born during 1831, formed the business. During the year 1858 Harland, who was the general manager at the time, purchased the small shipyard on Queen's Island. He bought the property from Robert Hickson, who was his employer.
When 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 the brand new shipyard built were for that line. By being inventive, Harland made the business a successful venture. One of his famous ideas was increasing the overall strength of the ship by replacing the upper wooden decks with iron ones. Furthermore, he was able to increase the ship's capacity by giving the hulls a squarer cross section and a flatter bottom.
The company eventually experienced increasing pressures in the shipbuilding sector causing them to broaden their portfolio and shift their focus. They decided to focus more on structural design and engineering and less on shipbuilding. The business also diversified into the fields of ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for additional projects that had to do with construction and metal engineering.
Harland and Wolff had other interests, such as a series of bridges to be constructed in the Republic of Ireland and in Britain. These bridges include the restoration of the James Joyce Bridge and Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge. In the 1980s, with the construction of the Foyle Bridge, their first 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 near identical Point class sealift ships which was constructed to be utilized by the Ministry of Defense. In 2003, the ship was launched, after being constructed under license from German shipbuilders Flensburger, Schiffbau-Gesellschaft.