belfast & the titanic
BELFAST’S TITANIC LEGACY
On the tenth anniversary of its opening, we revisit Titanic Belfast, which tells the story of the ‘unsinkable’ ship and the city that built it WORDS NATASHA FOGES
ILLUSTRATION: © LIZ KAY
“W
e have had a wonderful passage up to now. There has been no tempest. It is very nice weather but awfully windy and cold.” Esther Hart, from Ilford, Essex, penned a letter to her mother from the Titanic on Sunday, April 14, 1912, just hours before the liner struck an iceberg and sank to a watery grave. Esther and her daughter Eva escaped the disaster in a lifeboat, but there was no room for Esther’s husband Benjamin, who went down with the ship. Titanic Belfast, the city’s landmark attraction, is full of such heartbreaking stories. The location of the building itself, which was constructed ten years ago to commemorate the centenary of the sinking, immediately captures the www.britain-magazine.com
imagination: it stands alongside the slipways where the Titanic was built, and towers above the River Lagan where she was launched. The silvery structure, glinting to resemble rippling waves (or a giant iceberg, perhaps) is 38 metres tall, the same as the hull of the Titanic, its four corners jutting out to echo the hulls of ships. Inside, nine galleries chronicle the life of the liner. The journey begins in boomtown Belfast, which clanged with industry in the mid-19th century, from linen mills to ropeworks to the Belfast docks. It was in the Belfast shipyards that Harland & Wolff, the world’s largest shipbuilding firm, partnered with White Star Line, the prestigious shipping line, to create a ship that would set a new benchmark of excellence in naval architecture. BRITAIN
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