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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

27 Jan 2026: The BBC reported two weeks ago that planning permission has been granted for a large development of 403 homes in Carrickergus, near Ulidia College. From a roads perspective, the development requires the completion of Victoria Road, since the housing will be accessed entirely from it (via two T-junctions). So I think we will see Victoria Road completed in the very near future, with work possibly getting underway in the next year, though the developer has given no indication of a timescale, except that the entire development is to be completed by 2033. When completed it will provide another route for traffic to move between Prince Andrew Way and the upper road (B90 Marshallstown Road). The diagram below is from the Planning Service web site and shows the layout of the development, with the new section of Victoria Road visible on the right. The developer will also upgrade the nearby Prince Andrew Way / North Road junction as part of the works.

Diagram of the proposed development, as of Jan 2026, with the final stretch of Victoria Road running along the right hand side of the site. Click to expand.

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:

• This is the stub at the north end of the scheme at Bashford Park, as of 2024.
  
• This is the stub at the south end of the scheme, at Victoria Rise.
• This is the site of the former stub at the north end of the scheme, at Red Fort Park, which ceased to be a stub in 2020.