The shipyard ride inside the Titanic Belfast Experience One such element is a “shipyard ride”, where visitors board little remote-controlled carriages th at then travel th rough a huge 3-D mock-up of a shipyard full of colourful light displays, as indicated in this photo: The exhibition inside is hi-tech, state-of-the-art and indeed very “immersive” (hence the expression “experience”). Here’s a photo of the spectacular exterior – whose four corners are reminiscent of huge ship’s bows: The centrepiece of it all opened in April 2012, just in time for the centenary of the ship’s maiden voyage and subsequent sinking: the “ Titanic Belfast Experience ,” a shiny, hi-tech, multimedia, immersive “museum” of sorts (but there’s a reason they prefer to refer to it as an “experience”). The biggest such development is the “ Titanic Quarter ” at the former Harland & Wolff shipyard where Titanic and her sister ships where designed, built, launched and outfitted. (Although other places associated with the Titanic include Cherbourg, France, Southampton, Great Britain, and Halifax, Canada – plus there are numerous geographically unrelated places featuring large-scale Titanic -themed visitor attractions, especially in the USA ).Īnd so the first Titanic -themed guided tours appeared (in particular the “ Titanic Tours ” such as I was on in 2012, which unfortunately don’t seem to be available any longer), and sites associated with the ship started to be com modified for tourism. This didn’t begin to change until the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic” by James Cameron rekindled interest worldwide in what really must be the most legendary shipwreck story of all times.Īs the centenary of the sinking in 2012 draw closer, Belfast somehow overcame its reservations regarding the topic and started to embrace the legacy – realizing also that, short of the wreck itself, nowhere in the world would be better poised to cover this legacy in terms of tourism. For the first almost one hundred years after the sinking of the Titanic, this wa s rather seen as an embarrassment to Belfast and its otherwise proud shipbuilding legacy, at least locally. With regard to Titanic tourism, the development took even longer. ![]() In the case of Troubles tourism, this only really took off after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 put an official “end” to the conflict (though it’s still simmering quite a bit under the lid!) and Belfast began generally opening up to tourism, after decades of having “enjoyed” a reputation of something like a “no-go zone”. But that’s a comparatively recent development. Not so in Belfast, where it is right in your face. Otherwise, more usually, dark tourism is a rather niche cousin to mainstream tourism. ![]() I can’t think of many other places where dark tourism is as dominant a part of the local tourism portfolio … Berlin of course (as the capital of “dark tourism”), also Hiroshima and (to a lesser degree) Nagasaki as well as Phnom Penh, perhaps, maybe also Krakow or Gdansk. But both Troubles tourism and Titanic tourism do firmly do so. ![]() It’s not very often that a city’s top tourist attractions all fall within the catchment area of dark tourism. Most of its tourism industry revolves around the two “Big Ts”, that is “the Troubles” (more on that separately later) and the legacy of the RMS Titanic, both catered for by a range of specific individual tourist attractions and activities. Belfast is a rare case in terms of tourism.
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