Northern Area Plan 2016
Coleraine Borough: Coleraine

Coleraine is the dominant town in the Northern Plan area. The Regional Development Strategy published in September 2001 identified the town as one of the sixteen major hubs in the Region. By 2001 the town had a population of 23,700, the fifth largest town in the Region outside the Belfast Metropolitan Area and Londonderry. It is located strategically alongside the Northern Corridor and at the northern end of the link corridor towards Cookstown, Armagh and Newry.

The town is 90 kilometres north west of Belfast and 50 kilometres east of Londonderry, both of which are linked by the trunk roads and the railway of the Northern Corridor. This corridor also links the town with Belfast and Londonderry ports. Belfast City Airport, City of Derry Airport 35 kilometres to the west, and the main regional airport, Belfast International Airport, 70 kilometres to the south are all relatively accessible along the Northern Corridor.

Coleraine has a long history of settlement. The Mountsandel Mesolithic site has yielded among the earliest evidence of man in Ireland. The town has associations with Saint Patrick from the 5th Century, followed by a monastic site close to what was the lowest fording point on the Bann at Coleraine Bridge. The town was one of the two urban communities developed by the London Companies in County Londonderry in the Plantation at the beginning of the 17th Century. The town centre’s slightly skewed rectilinear street pattern is a continued legacy of that early exercise in town planning, along with traces of the lines of the earthen ramparts that provided the Plantation town with its defences. With some industrialisation, the expansion of the river port, and the coming of the railway, the town expanded significantly throughout the 19th Century and into the early part of the 20th Century.

Coleraine steadily expanded throughout the Post War period, with the population doubling, due to major industrial development on extensive suburban sites, the development of the University, the expansion of commerce and the development of extensive sport and recreational facilities. There has been a marked expansion of the urbanised area from the mid 20th Century compact town of less than 2 square kilometres, to the present much more dispersed town of approximately 11 square kilometres. Since 1980 growth has continued but at a slightly more modest pace. In the twenty years up to 2001 the town’s population increased by 22% to 23,700, but there was a reduction from 12% in the 1980s to 8% in the 1990s.

Coleraine has major industrial, commercial, educational, administrative, health and recreational facilities. The town retains an important industrial base with a number of major employers across a range of sectors. For many decades Coleraine has been the dominant retail centre in the north east of the Region. This has been strengthened in recent years by the completion of the Diamond Centre, the town’s first major indoor shopping mall, complemented by the progressive development of bulky goods stores at the Riverside Centre. The town has an expanding campus of the University of Ulster, a large Further Education College, and a wide range of high quality secondary and grammar schools. The Causeway Hospital, opened in 2001, provides acute health services. Apart from a wide range of recreational and sporting facilities within the town, including a large leisure centre, which has recently been modernised, Coleraine is located in close proximity to the North Coast with its attractions of national importance, tourist accommodation, and leisure facilities.

In the 16 years from mid 1988 to mid 2004, a total of 2,982 new dwellings were completed in the town. The North East Area Plan had postulated that 2,900 dwellings would be built in the period from 1988 to 2002, whereas only 2,651 were completed. There has been major residential expansion in the Knocklynn and Somerset/Greenmount areas in the south east and south west suburbs of the town, along with significant green field development north of the town between Cromore Road and Portrush Road, east of the ring road in Ballyarton, and north of Castlerock Road. There were also a significant number of dwellings completed on inner urban, brown-field sites (450, that is 15% of all completions).