5 March 2012

Titanic Belfast - Bright New Star on a City's Skyline

Something wonderful is about to happen in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  A hundred years after the Titanic set sail on her catastrophic maiden voyage a new center dedicated to the ship, her makers and passengers, will open in the city which built her. Titanic Belfast stands - magnificent and resplendent - in the very place the great ship was built. It is a structure as colossal (one hesitates before saying titanic) as the ship it honors.

It is the (albeit aluminum) icing on the cake for a city whose reputation once reached a nadir – seen by many as the Beirut or Mogadishu of Western Europe. Yet since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Belfast has undergone what can only be described, without hyperbole, as a renaissance. Visitors who remember the low points of the 1970s and 80s are often astonished by the transformation yet tourism is yet to truly burgeon.

Titanic Belfast hopes to change that – and even the cynically hearted grudgingly admit that it has every chance of doing so. It is certainly a gamble – it cost £97m (a cool US$153m). 

You can see where the money was spent just by looking at the bravura façade – even though some people have compared it rather unkindly to a Jawa Sandcrawler from the Star Wars movies (pictured left for quick comparison!). 

However, the interior promises to be something of a revelation as well.

A replica of the Titanic was, of course, out of the question.  As well as being the height of tackiness what Belfast needed was to look to the future as well as to revere the past.  The homage, of course, is unmistakable – it is inspired by hulls under construction in the shipyard and the parallels are driven home by some of the facts and figures.

You may get blinded on a sunny day if you don’t wear shades.  The huge bulk of the center is covered by 3,000 aluminum panels, sixty percent of which are unique.  The ‘hulls’ of Titanic Belfast are the same height of the original ship from keel to deck. The ship’s capacity was 3,547 people – the very same number of visitors that Titanic Belfast can hold at any one time.

Talking of people - a nod here to the (soon to be) long suffering staff who will work at Titanic Belfast. Why long suffering? Look at the two pictures above. Although these photographs were taken when the interior was still under recent construction, do they remind you of anything?  It will, no doubt, be the scene of a thousand Jack and Rose impressions per day. Imagine having to put up with that!

A century separates the two giants of their respective ages on the Belfast skyline but the time in which they were built is similar – around twenty six months.  There are 40,000 tons of concrete in Titanic Belfast’s foundations, nearly the same as for Titanic.

Titanic Belfast is to be found alongside the Titanic Slipways, the Harland and Wolff Drawing Offices and Hamilton Graving Dock – the exact same places where Titanic was planned, constructed and launched in 1912.

The building plays host to the story of the ill fated liner.  As Belfast was where RMS Titanic was born, the history starts in her planning – and through to the launch.  It will also cover that infamous maiden voyage and the ship’s last, dreadful hours. There will also be contemporary tales to tell – how the wreck was discovered at the bottom of the ocean and how its exploration continues.

Altogether there will be nine galleries, each devoted to a different element of the ships century long history. Upon opening on March 31st, 2012, Titanic Belfast will be the World's Largest Titanic Visitor Attraction.  This is most certainly a city determined that its future will not be a footnote describing quiet decline and gentle retreat from history’s pages.  Titanic Belfast – the city’s newest and proudest symbol – will, one hopes, help ensure just the opposite.

All photographs by and courtesy of Christopher Heaney. Kuriositas would also like to thank Aisling Dinsmore of Stakeholder Communications for her kind assistance. Click on any of the pictures above to visit the website and buy tickets.

12 August 2010

Why the UK is Going to the Frogs

At first we were afraid, we were petrified.  Well, not quite but there is a worrying trend going on in the UK.  It all started in London, as things sometimes do in the UK. The beginning of a worrying trend?  Perhaps not, we thought. Yet across the gulf of Lands End to John O'Groats, minds that were to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this country with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twenty first century (2010 to be exact) came the great Elephant Parade of London.

They did not come quietly either, like Dumbo and his friends on the train. There may not have been a crow chorus but there was plenty of trumpeting.  Yet people welcomed the elephants of London - they were for a good cause - and their eventual auction would raise a good deal of money to help Asian elephants in the wild - to the tune of four million of our British pounds.  Hurrah.

So, when the good citizens of the City of Bath in that most ceremonial of counties, Somerset, decided to adorn their urban environment with lions, who could possibly blame them?   They wanted to take pride (ouch) in their city and the rest of the country cheered on, in that polite, British sort of cheering-on-iness type of way.

The lion has long since been the symbol of this ancient city, which goes back to pre-Roman times.  So, a few dozen more lions did not phase the denizens of Bath - especially as the lions will go on to be auctioned for charity - in a similar way to the elephants of London.  Hurrah! exclaimed the breathless population of the UK (not to mention the tourist hordes who lay siege to Aquae Sulis each year). But then Chester just had to get in on the act. 

Another ancient and venerable city, Chester decided that the Rhino was their thing.   This particular parade of animals is known as Rhino Mania and the 62 sculptures dotted around the walled city most certainly create a kind of madness among the good folk of Chester, especially at around 11 in the evening when the city's pubs close.  Each morning one or two of the rhinos seem to have mysteriously disappeared, replaced by one of their unadorned brethren, with the notice that the original has gone to the vets.  Quite.

Why rhinos, however?  Well, the city zoo has nine of the real thing, which is quite a lot for somewhere outside of Africa - in fact, it's quite a lot for inside the continent, which is the point of this particular exhibition. The Chester rhinos will, in September, be auctioned off to support the getting on for extinct Black Rhinos of Kenya and Tanzania. One of the rhinos is even muscling in on the empty space left by the London elephants, guarding the entrance to the platform at Euston Station in London (see above).  Hurrah!  again. Probably.

Something's Got To Give.  Yes, the name of the unfinished 1962 Marilyn Monroe movie, but also the general sentiments of the upstanding council leader of Hull.  This lovely spot in the East Riding of Yorkshire is now home to a host of giant model toads.  To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the death of their most famous son, the poet Philip Larkin, £175,000 was squandered spent on reminding the people of Hull of Larkin's poem Toads. And Toads Revisited (we are not making this up, honestly!).

The council leader became rather miffed by the profligacy of his fellow councillors and has withdrawn the funding - which is a shame. In a way.  Larkin's Toad was a metaphor for work, and in both his poems on the subject he wished it would just go away - which now looks quite likely in all truth.

This aside, with all these sculptures of animals littering the country, could this be the final, proof positive (if we had to have it) that the UK is going to the frogs?