“No more will Great Yarmouth be considered a cul-de-sac at the end of the A47. Instead, it will be a gateway to the continent and the world beyond,” says Norfolk County Council leader Daniel Cox.

Winning support locally is one thing, but attracting international shipping lines to a new and untried facility will be quite another. Eddie Freeman, who took over as chief executive at Yarmouth in the summer, has been through it all before. As managing director of Humber Sea Terminal, he oversaw Simon Group’s massive investment in ro-ro berths at Killingholme, now a very busy facility owned by Cobelfret.

“If Killingholme is any sort of measure to go by, people were very sceptical in the early days about what was going on and that continued even when we started to build,” he says. “You just keep plugging away and raising the profile, and eventually people start to think about it.

“For us here, it is still very much a case of generally raising awareness of what is going on here. I believe the industry is very sophisticated. They tend to know what they want and if you actually get enough attractive things in one parcel, they start to think about you. But they have to know what is in the parcel first.”

The new outer harbour is being built with the support of £18m of public funding. A joint venture of Van Oord UK and Edmund Nuttall is building the breakwaters, with a total length of 1,400 metres, and these should be complete around the middle of next year. The project also involves the dredging and re-use of 1.6m cu m of sand to provide 17.6 hectares of land for future port development, and the construction of 450 m of quay.

Great Yarmouth – now operating as East Port UK – expects to have its new shortsea container terminal open for business in the first quarter of 2009. This will have an initial phase of a 200 metre quay and 12 hectare yard. Singapore operator PSA and port infrastructure company International Port Holdings (Jersey) (IPH) are developing the £30m container facility in a 60-40 joint venture – this project represents PSA’s first operational step into the UK.

“We are talking to the feeder operators in particular,” says Jean-Jacques Moyson, sales director of PSA-HNN. “We know there is tremendous growth in the container business and there are definite opportunities. And as PSA-HNN we have a solid base of clients to talk to, which gives us quite a big advantage.

“We see that feedering business is definitely picking up to and from the UK and we do believe that out of Great Yarmouth you have very good possibilities to cover the UK.”

Great Yarmouth Port Company is a subsidiary of IPH, whose chairman, Alistair Baillie, says the new name “East Port UK” reflects the port’s new status as “a multipurpose port serving a wide hinterland”. While the port’s ambitions as a shortsea/feeder container hub have been made clear, it is also handling a range of bulk, offshore and other cargoes at its existing facilities and will be looking for more business to fill the additional capacity within the outer harbour – without the size restrictions in the river.

The port recently announced a long-term agreement with Stema for the operation of a new aggregates berth.

The outer harbour project was first mooted 25 years ago, and in recent times it has attracted its fair share of controversy – largely because of the public subsidy granted as part of a drive to regenerate the town. Those who have followed the saga might find it hard to believe it is really taking shape.

But construction work is “on time and on budget”, says Eddie Freeman. The northern breakwater should be completed around the end of the year, and work on the southern breakwater is expected to start in December. The port is considering its options with regard to equipment, and is expected to put in an order for two new gantry cranes shortly.