British Isles Cruise: Day 7--Belfast, Northern Ireland

Thursday, August 22

Today is Belfast, Northern Ireland and our siteseeing today will be the newly opened Belfast Titanic Museum. 

This museum was our sole focus while in Belfast so I should warn you that if you don’t have the slightest interest in Titanic, you should probably skip this post entirely.

Belfast is the mecca and birthplace of this amazing ship and we were excited to explore the Titanic story in a fresh and insightful way; from her conception in Belfast in the early 1900's, through her construction and launch, to her infamous maiden voyage and catastrophic demise. The journey goes beyond the aftermath of the sinking, to the discovery of the wreck and continues into the present day with a live undersea exploration center.

The museum was just 200 meters from our ship.  Our stateroom was directly across the Titanic’s drydock, but it took a 10 minute taxi ride to reach the museum from the ship, as we maneuvered through the port streets and over a bridge.

Upon arriving at the museum we turned our prepaid voucher into tickets and rented an audio guide.  Then it was up the elevators to the very top of the building.  An employee  explained that they are trying to re-create the view from the top of the Arrol Gantry where workers would have been while building the ship.   It is at this point we got on the museum’s highlight attraction–The Shipyard Ride.


Each “car” holds six people: three in the front and three in the back. It is suspended from the ceiling and slowly maneuvers through the room, explaining how the Titanic was built.
There are movie screen projections of Irish workers, you hear the loud clanging of steel, sniff the smoldering smells, see the lumber and tools, etc.

The museum is completely interactive. Everywhere you look, there’s something to touch, read, lift, watch, etc. Instead of showing a first-class room, they built the entire room and had projections of real actors inside of it. One of our favorite displays is a three-walled room which feels like an elevator. It starts in the engine room and slowly travels upward so that you can see all three classes of decks which are computer generated. It was very realistic.

Third-class room

Second-class room

First-class room

There’s a giant movie-theater room that shows a 20-minute clip of Robert Ballard’s underwater exploration.  And on the floor level of this theater, there is a glass panel on the floor to stand on and “look down” on the ship underwater while a crew member tells a short story.

But here’s where Titanic fans will really be thrown for a loop…the people of Belfast will never mention that the ship broke in half.

True story! Throughout the entire museum, with all of its video presentations and audio tales from survivors of how it went down – they leave out the part of it breaking in half.

Robert Ballard proved this theory correct when he found the wreck in 1985. But the people of Belfast are so proud of it being “their ship” that they think of it as a letdown that their baby broke in two. For the record, it was physics that did this. Not faulty shipbuilding.

The area all around this museum is called the Titanic Quarter. They’re not done building it and it’s about to become a huge revitalized area of Belfast.  The people of Belfast have done a phenomenal job cleaning up the area and it should draw in tons of tourists in the future.

The museum is built right there at the top of Titanic’s old slipway. They have cleverly designed the area around the ship and her past. If you look at the light poles at the front of the museum that run all the way down the concrete area, they are exactly where each metal beam holding up the ship were. And if you walk out along the cement area and see white painted outlines, you are now “walking on the ship” as they have literally traced the entire length of the ship, right down to the drawing of the lifeboats hanging off the side.  Two ships were built simultaneously, side by side…the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic.

A look back at the museum you can see that the architecture of the museum represents four bows of a ship. 

Still outside the museum, we followed the road to the Titanic’s pump house and dry dock.

After looking at all the machinery that would pump water in and out of the dry dock, we then made our way outside to the mossy, old dry dock which once housed the beautiful ship.


You really get a sense of her size once you see this 100-year-old bathtub that Titanic sat in as she was fitted out. Titanic wasn’t just built all in one swoop, she had a shell built and then sea trials to manage and much glorious furniture and artwork and china brought onboard. It’s a shame it only saw sunlight for a few days.

An interesting sidenote was of passenger Frank Browne.  His uncle gave him the gift of a ticket from Southampton to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland.  An avid photographer, he took many photographs of the start of Titanic’s maiden voyage.  An American millionaire so enjoyed visiting with him on the ship that he offered to pay for his ticket to stay on to New York.  Frank was in training to be a Jesuit priest and when his superior heard his request to stay on, he was told “Get off that ship!”.  We first saw many of Frank Browne’s photographs of those first few days at the visitor center in Cobh, Ireland. 


By this time, the day was about gone and we needed to make our way back to the ship.  We both agree that this was one of the most fascinating museums we have ever visited.

A look at our ship from the Titanic drydock.