Titanic Exhibition

[HiMucker]

They are two small to be Kates.  That sculpture will look like a bukake victim when the birds shit all over it!

[haranguerer]

What or who is that supposed to be?

It's supposed to symbolise Kate on the hull of the Titanic. That's right, the film, nothing real!

Holy f**k

[Maguire01]

in terms of money- it breaks even with 300,000 visitors a year, though they are on course for something north of twice that this year

Does that take into account the capital build cost repayments, interest and running and maintenance costs ?.

What capital build cost repayments? It was funded mostly by public money. I'd imagine break-even on such a project is covering the operating costs now that it's up and running.

[Maguire01]

in terms of money- it breaks even with 300,000 visitors a year, though they are on course for something north of twice that this year

80,000 tickets were sold before it opened.

Come back next year when the centenary is over.

I wasn't suggesting it would do those numbers every year - I was referring to year 1 being substantially higher.
But if W5 can attract c.250,000 visitors per year and the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum c.170,000 then you'd have to imagine 300,000 is feasible for this attraction, given its profile and location.

[Orangemac]

Theres always a few miseries around. It may turn out to be a white elephant but it may be a success.

Most tourists that come to Belfast will see it. Where else would tourists go in Belfast, to see the murals? When you factor in school trips, tourists etc 300,000 is not a crazy figure.

[Declan]

By Matthew Holehouse
Wednesday April 04 2012
THE CITY of Belfast has "coarsened itself" by exploiting the sinking of the Titanic to draw in tourists, an academic has claimed.

The city is throwing a three week "festival" to mark the opening the Titanic Belfast museum and the centenary of the launch of the fated ocean liner.

William Neill, a professor of urban planning at Aberdeen University, said: "Belfast is unique in terms of the significance of the Titanic but the question must be raised as to whether that memory has been treated with enough respect.

"The city has lived with the shame of the sinking for many years. That has turned a corner and it is important that the role Belfast's great shipyard played in our maritime history is acknowledged.

"Whether what is now a mythic legacy should have been tied so closely to financial gain through selling 'infotainment' is more debateable."

Professor Neill is to address a conference on the phenomenon of 'disaster tourism' in Berlin. More than 1,500 people died when the RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 after striking on iceberg

In Belfast, the dockside where the ship was built and launched has been redeveloped with apartments and shops and has been rebranded the 'Titanic Quarter'.

A £97m, six-storey museum, designed by US architect Eric Kuhne, has opened which allows visitors to "experience" life on board and the sinking of the ship.

MTV, the pop music channel, is to host a concert to mark the ship's launch. X Factor winner Olly Murs and rapper Sean Paul and hip-hop artist Rizzle Kicks will perform.

On Monday the city council served a 'Titanic kitchen' in the city's covered market, where passersby could sample meals from the first, second and third class menus. Other events planned include a 6 mile road race, a light show, a musical and a day of urban sports, fashion workshops and magic shows beneath the Harland & Woff shipyard cranes.

A memorial garden bearing the names of the victims will also be opened.

Professor Neill added: "To host an MTV pop music extravaganza on the slipway where Titanic was built, on the eve of the centenary, begs some questions of taste, respect and dignity no matter what the promotional hype."

He said the city had failed to renovate the "magnificent" drawing offices where the ship was designed.

"I am dismayed to see how my own home city has branded a Titanic Quarter where tacky souvenirs are plentiful but where one of the most important physical legacies of the Titanic story, the womb of the ship of imagination, has been side-lined and neglected."

A spokesman for Belfast City Council said: "Belfast has been totally respectful of the loss of 1,512 lives on the Titanic. Relatives of those who died have been supportive of what the city has done and we believe we have remembered the tragedy but also the achievement in building the ship in an appropriate manner."

- Matthew Holehouse

© Telegraph.co.uk

[sheamy]

The whole 'Titanic' thing is at best what can only be described as questionable. In my opinion it's a dead duck.

The titanic and ship building strikes a particular resonance for the people of East Belfast whose ancestors worked there and that's understandable. However, it means precious little to anyone else in this part of the country.

To celebrate Titanic alone is to celebrate tragedy. It's crass and opportunistic, or coarse to use that professors term, even if the people who came up with it didn't mean it to be.

To celebrate a history of ship building is backward and narrow.

If they want to help tourism sort out the infrastructure instead of spending millions and millions on bullshit marketing and a £97 million building (nice as it is) on an industrial wasteland. When you have no product all the advertising in the world won't help you. e.g. trains that go west and not just east from Belfast.

Still, we always have Rizzle Kicks to fall back on...

'MTV, the pop music channel, is to host a concert to mark the ship's launch. X Factor winner Olly Murs and rapper Sean Paul and hip-hop artist Rizzle Kicks will perform'



Keep it real. Respect.

[Minder]

It also does not help when the local media and news stations in particular have been nothing more than tourist magazines for this venture, and refusing to ask any questions that might be seen as uncomfortable. I suppose they are doing the Executives bidding and don't want the Punt to shout at them again.

[sheamy]

I know...it's frightening. Even Martin McGuinness has lost of the run of himself describing it as 'Belfast's Sydney Opera House'. Gimme a feckin break. It'll be full of niteclubs in 5 years after the toffs have lost interest, just like its uglier sister the Odyssey Arena.

Bland is good. Neutral is good. The prods love the shipbuilding and the taigs, well, they're not too offended, so it's a perfect balance. Just don't mention the Maze site whatever you do!

£97 million to celebrate the culture and heritage of East Belfast. Tyrone GAA on the other hand can't get £1-2million which was due for their Garvaghy project. Now there's a living, breathing culture that hasn't been sunk or wiped out by modernisation.

Can't see Rizzle Kicks selling out Kelly's Inn any time soon either...

[tbrick18]

I know...it's frightening. Even Martin McGuinness has lost of the run of himself describing it as 'Belfast's Sydney Opera House'. Gimme a feckin break. It'll be full of niteclubs in 5 years after the toffs have lost interest, just like its uglier sister the Odyssey Arena.

Bland is good. Neutral is good. The prods love the shipbuilding and the taigs, well, they're not too offended, so it's a perfect balance. Just don't mention the Maze site whatever you do!

£97 million to celebrate the culture and heritage of East Belfast. Tyrone GAA on the other hand can't get £1-2million which was due for their Garvaghy project. Now there's a living, breathing culture that hasn't been sunk or wiped out by modernisation.

Can't see Rizzle Kicks selling out Kelly's Inn any time soon either...

I'd have to agree with all of this.
Always amazes me how anyone can be so proud of a ship that sank on it's first trip out! Not exactly a great marketing strategy for a ship builder.
It annoys me too about how Harland & Wolf are portrayed. Fact is they were a bigoted company with a sectarian workforce and the employment of Catholics was a big no no for them. Yet they are always painted as a great company to have worked for and they brought so much to Belfast blah blah blah.
Companies like that were instrumental in a lot of the problems this country endured but it always seems to be glossed over by the media as to how they were so sectarian.

For this new museum, don't see what all the fuss is about. I wouldn't bother my rear going to it anyway....and even if I did go once, is it the sort of place you'd go to again? It'll be another white elephant if you ask me. It'll probably pull in a bit of tourism for a year or two then it'll fall into financial difficulty then it'll be bought over by some private company who'll turn it into a venue for concerts and the like.
They'll open a load of bars and be on the tv flat out showing all the under age drinking that goes on there.

[saffron sam2]

Expect to see ship building in general and the Titanic in particular being introduced into curriculum for schools in the north.  This would mean half the required numbers could be guaranteed from school trips.

As a couple of posters above have alluded to, the anti-Catholic sectarianism of H&W is one of only two things that most people associate with that company (the other being the Titanic). I can assume therefore that this practice is given equal coverage in the new flagship building, particularly since much of the worst excesses of sectarianism occurred in the same year Titanic sank.

Or maybe not.

[Olly]

People need to lighten up. It's great to see shipbuilding making a comeback in Belfast. The yoyo and Rubik's Cube took off in the 80s as did the Cabbage Patch Dolls. In the 90s it was Pokemons and the little dogs or cats you tried to keep alive on your little fob - Tamogatchi? Sumo wrestling used to be massive in the early 90s or late 80s and Channel 4 used to cover it every week.

I remember a sumo wrestler called The Salt Shaker. He was class and my mother and I used to foam at the mouth watching his trials and tribulations on the TV. He might have been called Touchingawaka or Limahl or something. Then you had the American football fad of the late 80s/early 90s and Channel 4 did that again. Now AMerican Football hardly exists like the Tamogatchis.

Give shipbuilding itself a break and a chance. My oldest Nephew is 22 and he says for Christmas he wants a ship building case set bought for his birthday and I'm his godfather so myself and his father have ordered prefabricated sections, entire multi-deck segments of the hull , pre-installed equipment, pipes, electrical cables, and any other components within the blocks, to minimize the effort needed to assemble or install components deep within the hull once it is welded together.

[AQMP]

I have to concur with the posters who find the whole Titanic "brand" a bit unpalatable and I do agree with some of the sentiments expressed by William McNeill in the newspaper report.  Nobody gave a feck about the Titanic until Kate Winslet swooned about a film set and I do feel that the fact that 1,512 people lost their lives is being sidelined in the "aren't we all having a great time" message.

However my main point (and apologies if I steal your thunder Evil Genuis) is about the Belfast shipyard.  My father was neither a Prod nor from East Belfast yet he worked in the shipyard for almost twenty years from the early 1940s.  There is a small pedantic distinction between "The Shipyard" and the main company there "Harland & Wolff".  My father never worked for Harland & Wolff but rather for one of the many other smaller companies housed in the shipyard. True, almost all of these were sub-contractors to H&W and true, the vast majority of shipyard workers were employed by them.

The construction of the Titainc was begun in 1909 and in 1911 the construction was interrupted for repairs to be carried out to her sister ship, the Olympic.  The result of these two major jobs was an increase in the workforce at the shipyard.  Though shipbuilding had traditionally been seen to be the preserve of the Protestant population of East Belfast, the increased demand for skilled and unskilled workers attracted people from all over Ireland and could not be provided by East Belfast Prods alone.  There have been various bits of research carried out to show that at this time a sizeable proportion of shipyard employees were Catholic.  The "average" estimate would be around 12%-15%.  It was really only in the early to mid 1920s, following the upheaval of 1916-1922 in Ireland that H&W became an almost exclusively Protestant company.  But as me Da always pointed out many of the subbie companies in the shipyard were happy to employ Catholics as a lot of them were actually English and Scottish firms based in the Clyde, Liverpool or the NE of England.

I'm not defending the record of H&W and me Da was certainly no "West Brit" nor "Castle Catholic" and he would regale us with a couple of hair raising stories from his time there (usually after a couple of Power's, mind you) but at the time of the building of the Titanic maybe the needs of capitalism were more powerful than those of politics/culture.

[AQMP]

People need to lighten up. It's great to see shipbuilding making a comeback in Belfast. The yoyo and Rubik's Cube took off in the 80s as did the Cabbage Patch Dolls. In the 90s it was Pokemons and the little dogs or cats you tried to keep alive on your little fob - Tamogatchi? Sumo wrestling used to be massive in the early 90s or late 80s and Channel 4 used to cover it every week.

I remember a sumo wrestler called The Salt Shaker. He was class and my mother and I used to foam at the mouth watching his trials and tribulations on the TV. He might have been called Touchingawaka or Limahl or something. Then you had the American football fad of the late 80s/early 90s and Channel 4 did that again. Now AMerican Football hardly exists like the Tamogatchis.

Give shipbuilding itself a break and a chance. My oldest Nephew is 22 and he says for Christmas he wants a ship building case set bought for his birthday and I'm his godfather so myself and his father have ordered prefabricated sections, entire multi-deck segments of the hull , pre-installed equipment, pipes, electrical cables, and any other components within the blocks, to minimize the effort needed to assemble or install components deep within the hull once it is welded together.

Remember to use iron rivets Olly,

[johnneycool]

Expect to see ship building in general and the Titanic in particular being introduced into curriculum for schools in the north.  This would mean half the required numbers could be guaranteed from school trips.

As a couple of posters above have alluded to, the anti-Catholic sectarianism of H&W is one of only two things that most people associate with that company (the other being the Titanic). I can assume therefore that this practice is given equal coverage in the new flagship building, particularly since much of the worst excesses of sectarianism occurred in the same year Titanic sank.

Or maybe not.

Is there an iceberg in there as well?