Every vision of the future seems to share a common theme: high-speed rail.
Look at any sci-fi film. Flick through a glossy government brochure. Read any serious attempt to imagine how cities function in 30 or 40 years’ time. The image is always the same: fast rail collapsing distances into minutes, regions becoming single labour markets, cities functioning together rather than competing.
What you don’t see is a future held together by clogged roads, weather-dependent ferries, or the promise of “enhanced bus services”.
That’s why Chris Williamson’s proposal for The Loop feels genuinely futuristic. A high-speed circular railway linking major cities across Britain and Ireland, including Belfast, isn’t even a plan yet but it absolutely should get us thinking about how Northern Ireland connects to the rest of the UK.
So What Is Being Proposed?
According to Williamson, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, The Loop imagines a continuous, high-speed rail ring linking nine cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and Bangor(The Welsh one). Trains are envisaged running at speeds of up to 300 mph, with short, frequent services operating more like a metro than traditional intercity rail.
Williamson argues that connecting these cities would effectively create a northern powerhouse with a combined population of around 10 million people, comparable in scale to other major global cities.
We’ve Been Here Before
When Boris Johnson floated the idea of a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland, it was easy to dismiss it as a distraction from the real-life dramedy of Brexit. Engineers pointed to Beaufort’s Dyke, the deep trench in the North Channel used for decades as a munitions dumping ground. Economists warned about cost. Commentators queued up to call it lunacy. Sammy Wilson felt like a lone voice in support.
the-loop-chris-williamson
But politically, the bridge was never really about engineering or cost.
For many unionists, it was something closer to a Brexit buster, a physical rebuttal to the Irish Sea border. A way of asserting continuity with Great Britain at a moment when legal, economic and trading ties felt increasingly fragile. Sammy Wilson said as much at the time: the bridge symbolised trust, connection and belonging, not just transport.
We Already Know What This Looks Like (Just on a Smaller Scale)
The Staten Island Ferry
We already have a working example of the kind of thinking behind The Loop: the Staten Island Ferry. It effectively lets people “walk” into Manhattan and “mainland” New York City from the Fifth borough. It runs constantly, it’s free, and it’s treated as essential rather than optional. No one in New York debates whether the Staten Island Ferry is “viable” or whether it represents value for money – it’s simply part of how the city works.
The Loop, at a vastly larger scale, is trying to do something similar: turn water, borders and distance into just details rather than limits and for Northern Ireland, offer something close to a simple “walk” across the sea.
Cost Versus Buried Regrets
Whenever ideas like The Loop surface, the conversation narrows almost immediately to cost. Not value. Just the headline figure.
In this case, that figure is estimated at around £130 billion, large enough to end the discussion before it really starts. That reflex is expected.
A Bloomberg analysis published in late 2025 suggested the long-term economic impact of Brexit on the UK could be far higher than originally estimated. The scale of that loss isn’t wildly different from the cost of The Loop itself yet one is absorbed gradually, almost invisibly, while the other is treated as an unacceptable indulgence.
We seem oddly comfortable absorbing enormous economic costs by accident, but deeply uncomfortable investing deliberately to avoid them.
Vision Isn’t the Same as Fantasy
Belfast Circle Line
God knows I love a Circle Line. The idea of a fast, circular connection binding cities together is almost irresistible, and while I’m not prepared to file The Loop under “lunacy” just yet, experience tells me that an idea like this will likely drift into the long grass.
If that happens, it shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. If orbiting the Isle of Man proves too ambitious for now, the lesson shouldn’t be to think smaller but to think closer to home.
Before circling Britain and Ireland, we could start by circling Belfast.
A Belfast Circle Line wouldn’t require futuristic technology. It would simply ask us to connect the city we already have, its people, its quarters, and its existing rail corridors.
For now it seems, Belfast’s version of the future looks a lot like a bendy bus squeezing down the Antrim Road.
Aaron Vennard is a Managing Consultant with 15 years in Financial Services across New York, Chicago, Toronto, London and Dublin while locally advocating to improve public transport and active travel across Greater Belfast through the Circle Line Campaign.
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