Past is present in Belfast’s rebirth
Titanic museum is just one example of a storied city that acknowledges its heritage
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND— Most cities have some history; Belfast has more than most. Until roughly 20 years ago, Belfast’s history had made it a place no one would really want to visit. That’s changed, and now the city that only had Beirut to rival it for civic strife is one of the most pleasant destinations in the U.K.
Before and even during the nearly daily bombings and soldiers in the streets, Belfast had been a port and a maritime powerhouse, and among the many ships built there was the White Star liner Titanic and her sister ships, in the shipyards of Harland & Wolff on the banks of the River Lagan. Titanic’s fate is part of the city’s history, so five years ago it opened a museum, Titanic Belfast, on the spot where it was built, as a memorial to the ship’s tragic story and the city that built it.
The building is stunning — four silver ship’s prows bursting out at the corners, with the river on one side and the two massive yellow Harland & Wolff cranes, Samson and Goliath, on the other. The exhibits begin with the city itself, tracing its history and the evolution of its dockyards, before telling the story of Titanic’s creation, next to the Britannic, its sister ship, on the slipways behind it.
The most dramatic part of the whole building is the elevator built into a replica of the Arrol Gantry — the looming steel frame that moved the ships’ massive parts into place. Spaces are devoted to Titanic’s fit-out, the maiden voyage, the sinking and the aftermath, and the story of the discovery of the wreck on the Atlantic Ocean floor in 1985, each exhibit striving to profile the lives of the people who worked, survived or died on Titanic.
The building’s centerpiece is devoted to the launch of the ship on May 31,1911, with scale maps and sound effects and a huge set of windows looking down on the slipways where Titanic entered the water for the first time. With huge steel girders planted in lines to echo the Arrol Gantry that once stood there, the vast expanse is apark and a monument to the ship and its passengers, and a rare chance to walk the length of the ocean liner, its deck layout traced onto the ground.
It’s hard not to be moved as you stand there amidst the lines of iron girders under the thick clouds, as you let your mind drift back to the pride and confidence with which Titanic had been launched. They’d be shaken by the ship’s sinking, and shattered by the world war that broke out not long after. The weight of all that history seems to press down on the earth in that spot. Nearby sits the last White Star ship in existence — the SS Nomadic, a tender built to take passengers to the ship at Cherbourg, which nearly ended its life as a floating disco on the Seine before being returned to Belfast and restored.
People in Belfast love to talk about their history; on a table in the downtown branch of the book chain Waterstones, there’s a table with a sign that reads “A History of Violence: Delve A Little Deeper Into Our Troubled Past,” stacked high with dozens of books about the Troubles. The hop-on/hop-off bus tour, after it takes you past the parliament buildings at Stormont and the Gothic buildings of Queen’s University, has stops on the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, the Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods just a walk apart that had been at war just a generation ago. You’ll still see the murals there, celebrating the cause and mourning its victims.
That particular history is, hopefully, receding into the past as Belfast re-invents itself as a more compact version of Dublin, with its shopping district near Great Victoria St. revived after having been shuttered for years, and its own version of Temple Bar in the Cathedral Quarter, full of pubs and trendy restaurants, and young people. All around Titanic Belfast is the Titanic Quarter, a regeneration of the once-moribund shipyards, full of condos and offices, cafés and shops, where all that past is turning into a fertile seedbed for the future. Rick McGinnis was hosted by Northern Ireland Tourism, which didn’t review or approve this story.