For a century this was the "T-word" in Belfast, even more than the Troubles, an unwelcome reminder of a catastrophe reflecting badly on the city. This exhibition, opened in 2012 in a striking modern building, has revitalised a whole city quarter and rescued RMS Titanic as a source of local pride, for its construction and its crew.
About Titanic Belfast
You progress through the metal-bashing boomtown of Victorian and Edwardian Belfast, through the design, construction by Harland & Wolff, fitting out and test sailings, to events of the first and final voyage. Titanic left Southampton on 10 April 1912, picked up passengers by tender from Cherbourg and Cork, and sailed out into the Atlantic. She left behind a confident Britain that daily expected news of Captain Scott's triumphant return from the South Pole. The museum shows excerpts from films about her sinking, gashed by an iceberg that calved from a Greenland glacier about the same day the ship was launched. One myth that is nixed is the 1997 James Cameron film treatment, where patrician British officers near-as-dammit hold the Irish 3rd-class passengers' heads underwater while the gilded rich are helped to safety and the band plays on. In truth one group had even worse survival than 3rd class, and that was the ship's crew, many of them Irish. The final part of the exhibition has submersible images of the wreck, which lies in two pieces 12,500 ft / 3800 m deep off Newfoundland.
Titanic Belfast is a visitor attraction in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which opened in 2012. It is a monument to Belfast's maritime heritage on the site of the former Harland & Wolff shipyard in the city's Titanic Quarter where the RMS Titanic was built. It tells the stories of the Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank during her maiden voyage in 1912, and her sister ships RMS Olympic and HMHS Britannic. The building contains more than 12,000 square metres (130,000 sq ft) of floor space, most of which is occupied by a series of galleries, private function rooms and community facilities.
Plan your visit
- Where: 1 Olympic Way, Queens Road BT3 9EP (Belfast)
- Hours: Daily 10AM-5PM
- Price: Adult £25, conc £22, child £11
- Phone: +44 28 9076 6386
- Web: titanicbelfast.com
Details sourced from Wikivoyage (CC BY-SA 3.0), with background from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Published on 24 October 2026 at 12:00 pm