Victoria Road extension, Carrickfergus

 

Status
Construction scheme (partially completed)
Where
To extend Victoria Road north as far as the B90 Upper Road
Total Length
0.7 km / 0.5 miles
(of which 0.4 km was built 2019-2023)
Dates

Proposed in Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan - Nov 2004

250 metres south of Red Fort Park was build from late 2019 and during 2020 to access a site.
180 metres further south was built slowly from 2020-2023

Cost
Unknown - funded by private developers.
See Also

General area map

Carrickfergus Spine Road & Sloefield Road extensions - proposed schemes

Click here to jump straight down to updates.

Carrickfergus is a large town, predominantly acting as a dormitory town for Belfast. Due to the gently sloping terrain, the town's suburbs have developed as a grid with three east-west arteries and several north-south arteries. One of the north-south arteries is Victoria Road. However, Victoria Road only extends half of the way (from the A2 at the shore to Prince Andrew Way). This scheme is intended to see Victoria Road extended northwards to meet the B90 (known locally as the Upper Road) as shown in red on this map (blue shows existing parts of the road). Of this section, 420 metres was built by a private developer between 2019 and 2023 for the Bashford Park development. At the time of writing, June 2024, only the final 320 metres is unbuilt.


The proposal is contained in the draft Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan of 2004 (proposal CS 13/02) and is identified as a developer-led scheme. This means that Roads Service will not fund the scheme - it must instead be provided by housing developers as a condition of planning permission. About three quarters of the farmland beside the proposed route is zoned for housing.

Updates

19 Jun 2024: I have not updated this page in the 14 years since I created it and, truth be told, I had forgotten I had created it. So this update is to cover the changes that took place since 2010. In 2019 a private developer began work on the Bashford Park housing development. This necessitated the construction of 250 metres of the new road, south of Red Fort Park, to access the site. The road was built over the course of a year from 2019-20. The developer then built the houses and the road was slowly extended further south from 2020 until 2023 where it reached a new temporary terminus after 180 further metres. This leaves a 320 metre section of the site - stretching from Bashford Park to Ulidia College - unbuilt. This will not be built by the developer as it was not a condition of planning approval and it's not clear who WOULD fund it, as there are no further plans to build houses along the route and DFI policy is not to provide non-strategic roads at public expense, as recently confirmed by the Minister. So this may be where the story ends for now!

Photos

You can see two incomplete 'stubs' at each end of the proposed road which have been provided by developers in anticipation of its construction: