THE firm set to lead the transformation of Liverpool’s Stanley Dock area is behind the £7bn plan to revive Belfast’s run-down docklands wiuth a Titanic museum.

The Daily Post can today reveal that Irish-based Harcourt Developments is driving the £50m revival of Stanley Dock. It forms part of a wider £130m plan to breathe new life into north Liverpool, unveiled yesterday.

Harcourt is currently involved in building the Titanic Belfast, a Guggenheim-style museum and visitor attraction due to open next year to coincide with the centenary of the liner’s sinking.

It is a landmark building in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter development, which is located on a large brownfield site in the city’s harbour area, and takes in parts of Harland and Wolff’s historic shipyard.

Now the company plans to renovate Stanley Dock, in a scheme with apartments, bars, shops and a hotel.

Pat Power, development director for Harcourt, said: “For a long time, the tobacco warehouse has been a monument to the lack of investment in the area, but this funding will now be the trigger for major redevelopment in the North Docks, in the way in which Albert Dock was 20 years ago for the central docks area.”

It is the latest in a number of failed projects that had hoped to regenerate Stanley Dock.

In 2008, Kitgrove won planning permission for a scheme to create 900 flats in the three warehouses on the site, with 634 duplexes in the 14-storey tobacco warehouse.

Ian McCarthy, of Liverpool Vision, which has helped with the scheme said: “Harcourt’s proposal is to reduce the number of apartments from that really high figure of 900, down to something more like 300.

“It is a much smaller number of apartments with real live work-space.”