At 11.40pm on the 14th of April 1912, in the freezing North Atlantic 400 miles south of Newfoundland, the RMS Titanic, the largest, most luxurious, and most technically advanced ship ever built, struck an iceberg. Two hours and forty minutes later, at 2.20am on the 15th, she sank beneath the surface with 1,503 people still aboard, including her captain, her designer Thomas Andrews (last seen staring into space in the First Class smoking room, his lifebelt lying unused beside him), and the band, who played, according to the testimony of survivors, “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the water rose. The Titanic was built in Belfast, at the Harland & Wolff shipyard on Queen’s Island, and for a hundred years the city did not talk about it. The sinking was a source of shame, “She was fine when she left here,” the Belfast saying went, and the ship that was the greatest engineering achievement of the Edwardian age became, in its birthplace, a silence. That has changed. Today, the Titanic Belfast museum, a spectacular, silver-clad building on the exact slipway where the Titanic was built and launched, is the most visited tourist attraction in Northern Ireland, and the story of the ship, the city that built her, and the industry that defined Belfast for a century is told with pride, detail, and an emotional power that will leave you, honestly, moved. Here is a guide to Belfast’s Titanic maritime heritage.

Quick Facts: Titanic Belfast

• Titanic Belfast museum, the essential experience: The building is shaped like the prow of a ship (or, depending on the angle, an iceberg, the ambiguity is deliberate), clad in 3,000 aluminium panels that catch the Belfast light, and positioned at the head of the slipway where the Titanic was built between 1909 and 1912. The museum tells the story in nine galleries: the Boomtown Belfast of the early 20th century (the linen, the rope-making, the engineering, the city that was, for a brief, extraordinary period, the industrial powerhouse of the British Empire), the construction (a ride through a recreation of the shipyard, the heat, the noise, the riveters, the sheer scale of the undertaking), the launch (the 31st of May 1911, witnessed by 100,000 people, the largest crowd in the history of Belfast), the fit-out (the grand staircase, the First Class cabins, the Turkish baths, the luxury that made the ship the most famous in the world before she had even sailed), the sinking (told through the Marconi wireless messages, the testimony of the survivors, and a computer simulation that traces the flooding of the compartments, the mathematics of the disaster, the cold, dispassionate inevitability of the physics), and the aftermath (the inquiries, the legend, the discovery of the wreck by Robert Ballard in 1985). Allow 2.5–3 hours. Entry: ~£25. Book online, the museum sells out in the summer. Essential extra: the SS Nomadic (the last remaining White Star Line ship in the world, the tender that ferried passengers to the Titanic at Cherbourg. beautifully restored, docked beside the museum. Entry: ~£10 combined ticket with the main museum)
• The Titanic Quarter, walk the slipway: Outside the museum, the Titanic slipway, the exact outline of the ship traced in the ground, the bow and the stern marked, the angle of the launch rails, is free to walk. Stand at the bow, look out over the Belfast Lough to the sea, and imagine the ship, 269 metres long, the largest man-made moving object on Earth, sliding down the slipway and into the water for the first time. The scale is almost impossible to comprehend, and walking the length of the slipway, 269 metres, the length of three football pitches, is the most powerful way to feel it. The Titanic Quarter walk (the slipway, the Harland & Wolff cranes, Samson and Goliath, the yellow-painted gantry cranes that dominate the Belfast skyline, and the Thompson Dry Dock, the enormous dock where the Titanic was fitted out. Entry: ~£5 for the dry dock. The walk is free) takes about an hour
• The people, not just the ship: The Titanic story is usually told through the statistics, the 2,224 passengers and crew, the 1,503 dead, the 20 lifeboats for a ship designed to carry 64, but the museum’s greatest strength is its focus on the people. The Guarantee Group (the nine Harland & Wolff engineers who sailed on the maiden voyage to fix any problems, all nine died, and their names are inscribed on the memorial outside the Belfast City Hall), the 15-year-old Irish emigrant who wrote in her diary: “I am going to America on the Titanic. I am very excited. I am also very frightened,” and the bandmaster Wallace Hartley, who was found floating with his violin strapped to his chest. The Titanic was a tragedy of individual human beings, not a statistic, and the museum is at its most powerful when it remembers this