If there's anything you can't bump your head off aboard this historic warship, Dom Haley didn't find it.
Value: 6
Queues: 6
Shop: 7
Family Friendly: 9
Enjoyment: 8
Total: 36/50
If you haven’t seen it, HMS Belfast is the large, grey warship moored on the South Bank. I only mention this because my companion seems completely unaware that there's a massive 11,000 tonne battleship parked up on the Thames.
Not that the Belfast is a battleship. Oh no. One of the first things we’re told as we stand on the rain sodden deck is that this ship is in fact a light cruiser, a small-to-medium sized warship that was originally designed to trek around Britain’s imperial possessions showing the flag. To put it in perspective, HMS Duke of York - the ship the Belfast fought alongside during the Battle of the North Cape weighed in at a whopping 42,000 tonnes, which is almost four times the size of this tiddler.
The first stop on our tour is the big guns, because, let’s face it, everyone wants to see the guns. The Belfast is armed with several cannons of various sizes, but the big kahunas are the twelve six-inch guns housed in four turrets at the fore and aft of the ship (that’s front and back for all you land lubbers). Presumably, as some sort of in-joke between the MoD and the Transport Ministry, the six guns at the front are elevated to hurl a 51kg shell at a Travel Lodge on the M1; a target that is a good 12 miles away. This begs the question; do these puppies still work? “Oh yeah, there’s nothing wrong with them,” comes the answer from our guide. “All you’d need was some working ammunition, cordite, a six-person crew to man the winches and the firing pin.” As we’re looking a bit worried, he’s quick to add that you’d need to know how to do it – a strange point to make, as over his shoulder a video is playing that explains the whole process from start to finish.
As with every day-trip I’ve ever taken, the day I’ve chosen to visit HMS Belfast also coincides with the start of the half-term holidays, so almost every room we visit, ladder we have to climb and gangway we have to shimmy down is full of people. Normally being forced to step round people would ruin a day out, but when it comes to the Belfast the busyness sort of gives you an idea of what it was like to be on the ship during its wartime years – when a thousand sailors were milling around the ship’s endless corridors and rooms.
This brings me onto a very sobering thought. Even though the decor looks like a cross between my school’s design technology lab and Nuneaton’s working men’s club, and the piped smells of coffee, rum and laundry give the ship a strangely quaint 1950s feel, during the Arctic convoys this ship was the potential grave for several hundred souls. At the height of the Second World War, all these men had to sleep, eat and work, cramped in here for several months at a time. Imagine having to live out of a hammock, strung wherever you can get it, with only a simple rum ration to take away the tedium and the nagging stress that comes from knowing that you could be torpedoed at any minute.
It's a point that's really driven home when we climb up the bridge section. Even though the ship was extensively remodelled in the 1960s so that very few of the '40s fittings survive, you can’t help but feel for the poor sods that had to stand up here on watch for four hours at a time, frozen by the sub-zero temperatures and soaked by waves that crashed over the ship as it steamed through the Baltic Sea.
Perhaps that's the reason why someone decided it was important to keep this ship from the breaker's yard. Although it makes a great place for kids to run around and for people like me to get mild concussions from all the low hanging beams, this is ultimately a ship of war and war puts ordinary people in pretty crappy situations and expects them to deal with it. Yeah, HMS Belfast is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
HMS Belfast is open 10 AM to 6 PM most days of the year. Adult tickets cost £13.50, students concessions are £10.80 and kids under 16 can visit for free.
http://hmsbelfast.iwm.org.uk/
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