Launching ... an artist's impression of a gallery at Titanic Belfast.
Titanic Belfast marks the centenary of the tragedy and a turning point for the city, writes David Atkinson.
For Susie Miller, it's personal. "My dad gave me a battered old book to read as a child and it turned out to be a collection of short stories by my grandfather," the Belfast tour guide says. "One was about his own father, Thomas Miller, who worked as an engineer and was one of the 1517 people who died on the Titanic. When he sailed away, my grandfather never saw him again.
"Nobody talked about Titanic around here for years. It was filed away and unspoken. But I wanted to keep my great-grandfather's name alive, to tell his story to people all around the world."
This type of story and its powerful connection with Belfast will make the new Titanic Belfast visitor attraction the biggest thing, physically and metaphorically, to happen to the city for many a year.
Titanic Belfast opens on March 31, as part of the Titanic Quarter, billed as Europe's largest urban-regeneration scheme. The opening marks the 100th anniversary of the shipping disaster and provides a legacy of one of the most moving stories in modern history.
The imposing architecture reflects several compelling influences: ships' hulls, ice crystals and the White Star Line motif. This will be the biggest Titanic exhibition in the world. More than 35,000 tickets have been sold and operators are expecting 400,000 visitors in the first year.
When Titanic Belfast opens, Miller will remember her great-grandfather and the other souls lost in the icy waters of the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. She will lead some of the inaugural tours of the experience, recounting the human stories behind the myths about the liner's ill-fated maiden voyage.
The Titanic Belfast Festival follows, with the Titanic Light Show on April 7-11, an opening event that will project the Titanic story on the new building via digital mapping. After, free installations will be staged for four evenings. A gala event, Titanic: A Centenary Commemoration, will take place at the Waterfront Hall on April 14. Titanic, a new play by Belfast playwright Owen McCafferty, based on the 1912 British Board of Trade inquiry into the sinking, completes the festival. The play is staged from April 22 to May 19.
Commissioned by White Star Line, Titanic was built on the slipways of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. The city was an industrial powerhouse at the time, with 30,000 men employed in shipbuilding. RMS Titanic was the crowning glory. "We have a saying in Belfast," says Derek Booker, a skipper at the Lagan Boat Company. "She was all right when she left here."
The 74.9-hectare waterside development on Queens Island spreads eastwards, with housing and business parks. Most of the attractions for those fascinated by the great ship are grouped in the Titanic Quarter on the River Lagan side of Queens Road, the sunny side of the street from where Van Morrison once dreamed of walking down tree-lined avenues.
I join one of the regular walking tours of the quarter, along the riverside from Titanic's tender, SS Nomadic, to the Thompson Dry Dock. There are plans to extend the visit to the latter this year, taking people down to the floor of the dry dock and to the pumping engines.
For me, the most palpable sense of history comes with a visit to the Harland and Wolff offices, dating from 1867. There are plans to redevelop them as a hotel but for now they are a lost-in-time shrine to the Titanic dream. The faded H&W logo is etched into the revolving glass doors.
"They were so proud of that ship, the people of Belfast, and when it sunk it was terrible and they wouldn't talk about it," says Kathleen Whitley Power, whose grandmother was lost with the ship.
Titanic left Southampton for its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, calling at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, to collect passengers. It set sail for New York on April 11 with 2223 people on board. A lifeboat drill was never staged.
The ship set standards for luxurious travel, especially in first class, with its Edwardian country-house fittings. The main staircase was a copy of one in Belfast City Hall and the Ritz-Carlton grill was lavishly grand. Cargo included a Renault car owned by a wealthy passenger, a cask of china destined for Tiffany & Co. in New York and four cases of opium. They never arrived.
Titanic was 48 hours short of New York when disaster struck. The collision with an iceberg occurred about midnight on April 14 and Captain Edward John Smith called to abandon ship. For the 2223 people on board, there were 1178 lifeboat spaces.
The Titanic's seven-member band played on during the flawed evacuation, until the ship sank about 2.20am on April 15.
Captain Arthur Rostron, of the Cunard liner Carpathia, answered the SOS call and the ship's crew plucked more than 700 survivors from the water and lifeboats, docking them in New York on April 18. Canadian ships recovered bodies from the ocean, taking the remains for burial at Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Titanic Belfast will include a section of audio diaries by survivors and people whose lives have been touched by the story. It's a deeply personal tale but one Miller, and perhaps Belfast, feels ready to address. "It has taken us 100 years but, having grappled with the legacy, we can finally honour the Titanic dead," Miller says, as we walk through the Titanic Quarter.
"When I present visitors with real stories about real people, it often leaves them dabbing at their eyes. If some of the group are blubbing by the end of the tour," she says, with a smile, "then I've done my job."
Eithad has a fare to Dublin from Sydney and Melbourne for about $1770 low-season return, including tax. Fly to Abu Dhabi (about 14hr), then to Dublin (8hr 30min). Emirates began flights to Dublin this month via Dubai with a similar fare. Belfast is a 90 minutes' drive or a two-hour train journey from Dublin. Qantas has a fare to Belfast from Sydney and Melbourne for about $1906 low-season return. Fly to London via Singapore (about 23hr) then on British Midland to Belfast (1hr 25 min).
Full story in nine galleries
The dramatic £90 million ($134 million) Titanic Belfast visitor attraction opens on March 31 but we've had a preview of what's inside — and it's more of a journey than a set of displays.
The story starts in the first gallery with 1912 "boomtown Belfast" and takes you in a caged lift to the fourth floor for an atmospheric six-minute cart ride through the shipyards. The third gallery is based around a glass apex with a film projection re-creating the completed Titanic on the slipways outside. It launches into dry dock for fitout, with depictions of the first-, second- and third-class cabins in the next gallery.
The cave section is a journey through the bowels of the ship, projected on the walls.
Gallery five is based on the ship's maiden voyage and re-creates life on board. In the next gallery, the walls narrow and the temperature drops as we trace the timeline of the sinking from iceberg collision to final gasp of air on April 15. The British and American inquiries into the disaster follow in the next gallery.
The final two galleries are just as evocative, devoted to the legends of the ship, with touchscreen displays of Titanic folklore and a voyage to the Nova Scotia seabed where the wreck now lies, using film footage of an ocean dive in 1985. An Ocean Exploration Centre, developed with marine biologists, completes a memorable visit.
For more information, see titanicbelfast.com and discoverireland.com.
- Telegraph, London
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