IN JULY 2013, the hugely impressive Titanic Belfast centre welcomed its one millionth visitor through the door, just 14 months after its initial opening just days before the 100th anniversary of the sailing and sinking of the ill-fated liner.
In the first year alone, the attraction welcomed 800,000 people through the doors and in August of that year I was one of those people. Having decided to spend a few days up north with family, we went on a bit of a cultural trail, driving to the tip-top of Ireland on our first day to see the Giant’s Causeway before coming back into Belfast city for the second day of the trip.
I had never been up north before – for so many years, it was mentioned in derogatory tones or my knowledge of it came from the news where you’d hear of another bomb, or shooting or atrocity perpetrated by one side or the other during the Troubles.
My mother tells her own stories of experiences in the North of Ireland which include she and my dad having dinner in a pub which was blown up about two weeks later by the IRA and a border guard asking my dad if he was trying to get rid of my mother already – they were on their honeymoon!
I suppose, for both of us, we saw it through different eyes. My mother saw a different Belfast to the one she had experienced 40 years ago when you walked from A to B as quickly as you could and there were certain areas (which there probably still are, as there are in any town) that you didn’t walk down on your own, at night, or ever.
For me, it was my first view of a city which before I had only heard stories of. As a child, Belfast was a war zone or at least that was how I remember it being depicted or comprehended as from the various news reports. But driving into it after picking our way through windy back roads in torrential rain was a bit of a revelation.
Driving through the streets to find our hotel, I was struck by what I can only call the ‘European-ness’ of the city. The streets around the main part of the city are like something you would expect to walk down in some of the older town centres around Europe and the Grand Opera House in the city centre where we took in a new musical ‘Titanic Boys’ is akin to The Gaiety and other theatres I’ve visited across Europe. There was also a healthy and happy crowd of arts lovers in attendance.
There were no signs of any past conflicts – apart from some of the murals on the outskirts, and a rather grim experience driving through Ballymena, the home of actor Liam Neeson but that was where the positive associations stopped.
A big, nightly music festival was taking place in the city while we were there but there was no over zealous revelry where we were – Belfast was very much a city that was living in the present and thinking towards its future.
And that is where the £77 million project Titanic Belfast comes in. It was described recently on a Nationwide episode that I caught at the time but for the life of me can’t find to re-watch. However, the points being made were very clear – the rush was on to complete this mammoth monument in the Titanic Quarter – alongside the old Harland and Wolff site which was so central to the city for the past centuries.
Titanic Belfast is a symbol of the new Belfast – one that has come out the other side of the most torrid and horrendous of times that people on this side of the border or as young as I could only speculate on.
My own experience of the centre was a very positive one – an interactive experience that could realistically take all day such is the level of facts and information. Possibly a little bit too much? Maybe, but as a history lover, I thoroughly enjoyed piecing together the cultural factors that made the city such a huge industry leader in the early 1900s. Its specialities were whiskey, shipbuilding and linen – not the worst combination to put on a tourism brochure!
Harland & Wolff still operates in the area but now builds wind turbines – a subject that draws almost as much comment as the fate of the most famous ship in the world.
The sinking section is minimal and understated but eerily so. Two graphics show how the ship sank but the use of the original distress calls printed on the wall alongside them emphasise the fear and panic that must have been setting in. The final call from the Titanic cuts off mid sentence and a later communication from one of the nearby ships says something along the lines of, ‘they must have lost power, I hope they’re ok’ – a chilling note to end on.
Titanic Belfast has a duel purpose – or at least that’s how I see it. It serves as a reminder of history – both that of old industrial Belfast in the early 1900s and of the more recent history, and how it is being put behind them.
At the opening of the centre in 2012, First Minister Peter Robinson said that the centre demonstrated that the city was in a new era, there was a strong confidence that the people of Northern Ireland could move forward: “I think it’s a sign of the times that people in Northern Ireland have now left the Troubles behind and they are wanting to see a bright future.”
That sentiment was echoed by Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness who described the centre as “our attempt to write a new history, to move forward in a positive and constructive way, a very inclusive way.”
In the same way that the dismantling of the Berlin Wall reunited a city, the construction of Titanic Belfast seems to have done the same.
