One minute, you are being whisked through the busy Belfast shipyard where the Titanic is being built. The next, you are contemplating, amid a chilly piped-in breeze and lights mimicking darkened waters, the horror of freezing to death in the North Atlantic.
In between, Belfast’s impressive new tourist attraction — the £100 million (US$160 million) Titanic Belfast visitor center — offers a loving portrait of the excitement, ambition and opulence surrounding the doomed transatlantic liner.
With 100,000 tickets already sold, Belfast is betting it will deliver a lasting tonic of tourism to the conflict-scarred city. A three-week festival featuring talks, walks and seven Titanic-themed stage shows — including Titanic The Musical — began yesterday to mark the 100th anniversary of the ship’s launching.
A visitor’s first impression will be of the center’s exterior: four jutting prows of the ship, lined in silver steel paneling, six stories high.
Belfast Titanic marketing director Claire Bradshaw said the aim was to create an icon that people would come to associate with Belfast — like the Eiffel Tower for Paris or the Statue of Liberty for New York.
The center sits beside the Belfast Lough dockside where the vessel was built from 1909 to 1911 and set sail for its sea trials on April 2, 1912. The Titanic began its fateful maiden voyage from the English port of Southampton eight days later, striking an iceberg just before midnight on April 14 and sinking within hours with the loss of 1,514 lives.
A roller coaster-like ride takes visitors, up to six per carriage, up and down three floors of a re-creation of the Harland and Wolff shipyards that made the ship for Liverpool’s White Star Line. No, there are no thrills or spills, just a panoramic tour suggesting the scale of the hull and the energy of the dockworkers, all of them video projections of actors in period costumes.
Visitors can hear the commentary in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian or Chinese.
Next, visitors see a four-minute CGI tour of the finished Titanic, rising deck by deck, from engine room to the famed first-class cabin staircase. In the same room are recreations of first, second and third-class cabins, again with video projections of fictional passengers going into their bunks or getting ready for dinner.
Every available wall is plastered, in logical chronology, with details about every phase of construction, every firm and engineering specialty involved and every part described from the ship’s four 7.3m wide funnels to its six onboard pianos.
The ship’s voyage to Southampton, then to its other European ports of call in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, are detailed in turn: The numbers and notables who boarded, their stories and tales of excitement about the voyage to New York ahead.
An entire wall is given over to a reprint of the final surviving photograph taken of the Titanic on April 11, 1912, as it sailed away from Queenstown, the County Cork port today renamed Cobh.
Around the next corner, Titanic Belfast plunges into the disaster. A series of panels reprints the confused wireless messages among ships as the Titanic appeals, minute by minute, for help from other vessels. The room is deliberately chilly as light projections create an image of dark lapping waters underfoot.
In the next section, visitors are invited to explore the stories of survivors and the final words of those who perished, most impressively by using interactive touch screens that link to family photos, diaries and related newspaper articles. The role of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in receiving 209 bodies buried in the city’s cemeteries is detailed.
Down a stairwell with a wall filled with ghost-white life preservers, visitors can hear and read testimony from the British and US inquests into how the disaster happened. Or they can explore one of several slick touch-screen databases of every passenger and crewmember indexed by name, age, sex, nationality, job, cabin class, port of embarkation — and whether they perished or survived.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of