Titanic museum to open in Southampton by 2012
It is 97 years next month since she went down, but the Titanic - the supposedly unsinkable liner that scraped an iceberg in the north Atlantic on her maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1,500 people - continues to exercise a huge public fascination. There have been several films and myriad books and documentaries, Belfast has its Titanic quarter around the docks where she was built - and now Southampton, the city which provided most of the crew, is planning its own interactive museum, to open in time for the centenary in 2012.
John Hannides, the city councillor responsible for culture and heritage, was yesterday predicting hundreds of thousands of visitors: "Southampton was the home of the Titanic, so it is only fitting that we tell our story. The impact was felt right across the world, but nowhere more so than here. I don't think we're competing with Belfast. We've not been in close contact with them, but the two experiences are not mutually exclusive."
Southampton was thrown into deep mourning by the tragedy. It was the port from which the new liner set off on her maiden passenger voyage on 5 April 1912 and 549 of the dead, a third of the total casualty list, hailed from the city - yet only one was a passenger. The crew's professionalism and dedication in staying with the sinking ship has hitherto been marked with a modest monument to the Titanic's engineers in a city park. Among the other dead were waiters and stokers, sailors and stewards whose stories have been overlooked.
On display will be many of the 4,000 artefacts from the disaster that the city has gathered over the years, many of which are in storage: plates and cutlery, letters and menu cards, and fragments garnered from the seabed after the wreckage was finally located by a team led by the American oceanographer Robert Ballard in 1985. Also in store are recordings of the recollections of about 70 survivors...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
John Hannides, the city councillor responsible for culture and heritage, was yesterday predicting hundreds of thousands of visitors: "Southampton was the home of the Titanic, so it is only fitting that we tell our story. The impact was felt right across the world, but nowhere more so than here. I don't think we're competing with Belfast. We've not been in close contact with them, but the two experiences are not mutually exclusive."
Southampton was thrown into deep mourning by the tragedy. It was the port from which the new liner set off on her maiden passenger voyage on 5 April 1912 and 549 of the dead, a third of the total casualty list, hailed from the city - yet only one was a passenger. The crew's professionalism and dedication in staying with the sinking ship has hitherto been marked with a modest monument to the Titanic's engineers in a city park. Among the other dead were waiters and stokers, sailors and stewards whose stories have been overlooked.
On display will be many of the 4,000 artefacts from the disaster that the city has gathered over the years, many of which are in storage: plates and cutlery, letters and menu cards, and fragments garnered from the seabed after the wreckage was finally located by a team led by the American oceanographer Robert Ballard in 1985. Also in store are recordings of the recollections of about 70 survivors...