Reader Alsadius visited Belfast in August 2018, and has agreed to share his experiences here.
One of the things I planned to visit on our trip to the UK was the Portsmouth historic dockyard, whose review can be found here. But as we were wandering around London, I noticed a surprisingly large ship in the middle of the Thames. The World War II light cruiser HMS Belfast was preserved as a museum ship in basically the most accessible possible location for a museum, right in the heart of London.
Belfast was laid down in late 1936 as part of the pre-war military buildup, and commissioned in August 1939, less than a month before the war started. She spent the first couple months cleaning up German merchant shipping in the North Sea, and even won prize money (which would be abolished in 1948) for one capture. But she struck a German mine in November, broke her keel, and was nearly scrapped.
The Admiralty decided to keep her, though, so after almost three years of repairs and upgrades, she re-entered service in November 1942. She spent most of 1943 escorting convoys to Russia, but at the end of the year, she played an important role in the Battle of the North Cape, tracking KMS Scharnhorst on radar and allowing HMS Duke of York to intercept and sink her, in one of the last naval gun battles in history.
In 1944, she participated in a raid on the KMS Tirpitz, and was headquarters of a group of ships in the D-Day bombardments. Interestingly, Churchill wanted to see the bombardments in person, on Belfast. Despite opposition by Admiral Cunningham and General Eisenhower, he was dead-set on it until a personal intervention by the King finally dissuaded him from going.
Once the battle lines moved too far inland for her guns, she was refitted for service against Japan, but never served there before the Japanese surrender. She was, however, in Japan at the time the Korean War started, and served as a bombardment, anti-aircraft, and patrol ship. She was modernized again in 1956, served until 1963, and was in reserve, or used as a barracks ship, until 1970.
While plans were made to scrap Belfast, the Imperial War Museum asked to preserve one of her gun turrets. In the ensuing conversations, the idea of preserving a whole ship was raised. The government originally balked at the cost, but a private trust was created to fund the work, and the government turned it over in 1971. She was opened to the public on Trafalgar Day (October 21), 1971, as the first British museum ship saved since HMS Victory.1
The ship was a treaty light cruiser, mounting twelve fast-firing 6” guns in four triple turrets, and six torpedo tubes, as primary armaments. Armour was 4.5” on the belt, with deck armour up to 3” thick over the magazines. The four engines could generate 80,000 horsepower and drive the ship at 32 knots. Total displacement was 11,550 tons.
Overall, the experience was quite good. Most of the ship was accessible, the signage was usually quite good, the audio tour was better than most, and there were some demonstrations that were informative without being too cheesy. We spent about three hours there, though I tend to move fairly slowly through museums.
It’s worth noting that they’ve apparently taken the chaos of 2020 as a good time to do some refits on the ship, and so it’s currently being improved in various ways. Some of this is likely to change by the time it re-opens, which is currently scheduled for summer 2021.
A map of the accessible parts of the ship. See also here.
Also, some amusing vintage signage.
Probably the best part of the ship for me was the engine and boiler rooms. The machinery is no longer running, but the room imitates it well, with sound recordings, good signage, and a lot of machinery still in place.
The signage is pretty informative, all told.
A high-power turbine, for fast movement.
And a (substantially smaller) low-power turbine, for more fuel efficiency while cruising.
What looks like the original electrical system, though with modern safety bars to keep any idiot from flipping them on.
The turrets were also pretty good, though in fairness I’ve never been in a battleship turret to compare it to. Astonishing how 27 men could fit in there to work, though – it’s not terribly big. Unfortunately, my pictures from inside the turret don’t give much of a sense of the space, but you can see all the big guns. And we all know that big guns are the most important part.2
One of the 6” guns.
The propellant (orange canister) and shell for the gun. Sorry for the blurry photo.
A feed tube for the propellant, brought up from the magazine below. These were light enough that they could be directly sent up, seemingly without a hoist. I suspect this kind of high-speed ammunition supply was necessary for the gun to be able to fire eight rounds a minute.
A twin 40mm AA mount
On the whole, it’s worth it for any reader of this blog who has a few spare hours in London. Any tourist to London is likely to get within a couple hundred yards of it anyway, and it’s in fairly good shape as a museum ship. It even has a non-cheesy gift shop. I’d recommend it.
Reader muddywaters has provided an updated review of Belfast in 2026 in the comments.
Comments
Great review! I haven't been on Belfast in a decade or two, but she was my first museum ship. I remember when I was about 7 or 8 having great fun pointing one of the 40mm Bofors mounts (which could still traverse and elevate using handwheels) at things.
Incidentally, like Warrior which is now officially "HMS Warrior (1860)" as the name was in use for a shore establishment, Belfast is scheduled to be renamed "HMS Belfast (1938)" before the commissioning of the Type 26 frigate Belfast in the mid-2020s.
She was actually my first museum ship too, other than perhaps a visit to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMCS_Haida as a kid(like, 7-8 years old? If I'm remembering the right trip, I was bored.)
Also, Bean, I lol'd at your footnote.
If I had to describe Naval Gazing in a tweet-sized format, I'd use Footnote 2 verbatim.
Visited earlier this year. They have at least one of most things viewable, but a lot of the smaller compartments only let you look through the hatch and not actually go in. (Though usually looking over a barrier rather than through full-height glass so you can at least take good photos. I don't know what the spaces that are now visitor facilities or obviously-non-original displays used to be, but they plausibly could have been something like berthing that there were several of.) It is possible to book a private tour that enters some normally-barriered spaces, but I didn't.
In particular, you can't do that any more: you can get nearly right up to the guns (of all sizes - 40mm, 4", 6") but not actually hold the controls.
The main and weather decks are free-wandering spaces. I frequently got lost on the main deck, but since that mostly meant losing track of forward vs aft in an obvious main corridor, it didn't take that long to become un-lost. The visitor routes that go above or below that (via the original ladders, i.e. very steep stairs, so wear sensible shoes and don't bring anything you'd need to carry in your hands) are one-way loops, probably to avoid the potential safety risk of trying to pass people on ladders. However, they are still taken at your own pace, and you are free to repeat each loop as many times as you can fit in the day. I didn't try the audio tour.
Despite the impression you might get from their map not marking any of the fire control spaces, this is a museum that knows fire control mattered. There was a gunnery and fire control talk twice that day (I don't know if it's every day; given in a classroom, not at any of the actual equipment), and the video loop at the 4" mounts notes that they were limited by poor fire control. You can go into the operations room (CIC, behind the bridge) and up to but not inside the transmitting station (fire control computer room, near lower steering) and the main director (above the flag deck).
I found the World of Warships game room a good hands-on demo of why real navies didn't do things that way, in particular of "long-range shooting without proper fire control is mostly a waste of ammunition" and "overall situational awareness is a separate job from aiming at the current target for a reason". However, I saw no evidence that anyone had actually intended it to have that effect. Hence, it would be easy for a visitor who wasn't already familiar with these ideas to simply not notice the lack of them.
One of the engines is displayed with the gearbox and main turbine uncovered. The turbine blades look too small and delicate to push 10k tons of ship, but given that there's a lot of blades and they move fast, that's not actually a contradiction. I never found the main condenser (or the low-pressure turbine if there is a separate one), but I don't know if it's actually not visible or if I was just in too much of a hurry (to get to the talk) at that point.
The less obviously nautical/military spaces often gave a feeling of "this is what life/work in general was like at the time" (e.g. offices with typewriters and paper-based filing, sickbay, maintenance workshops). The sleeping quarters and the galley mostly didn't, as the densely-packed bunks and heavily industrialized food prep were too obviously different from the civilian norm. It's plausible that a museum warship is a relatively good place to see a fairly broad range of that, because ships spend days to weeks at a time with limited access to outside help, and keeping people and machinery functional for that long requires a variety of support functions.
I must have passed through a hatch in the (2-3") armored deck several times, and can guess at exactly where, but I never actually noticed I was doing so.
The helm (with traditional spoked steering wheel) is inside the armor, and hence has no view of the outside. A display next to it explains how that worked, with a copy of the steering wheel connected to a simulator you're invited to try. While I think this display had an "ordered course" pointer on the same dial as the current actual heading, it strongly implied that the real version relied solely on verbal orders (via voice tube), and what I could see of the real equipment agreed. I find this weird, given that follow-the-pointer control was standard for gun mounts, and verbal orders have the serious (for a warship) disadvantage that they can go unheard if there is loud background noise (such as gunfire). Might this be a deliberate attempt to discourage turning in combat because that's bad for fire control??? Or did the British not have anything that was both reliable under rapid input changes (ruling out their usual step-by-step system) and accurate enough???
Bizarrely at first sight, Belfast's soap and tobacco store is inside the armor, as are a shower room and probably several more non-vital things, while the operations room isn't. The signage has no comment on this; it mentions that soap and tobacco were kept away from the food because of their smell and that the showers were near the boiler room for hot water, but neither of those needs to imply inside the armor. At a guess, the volume of the armored box was set by the weight of the ship (i.e. the requirement to not sink when non-armored spaces are flooded) or some other requirement that wasn't the volume of its vital contents, while having the operations room near the radars (very early ones had a limited antenna-to-display distance) and/or bridge windows (because visual observation was still important) was considered more important than the protection that cruiser-level armor would provide.
Thank you for that updated review. I've linked it from the main post.
Re the soap and tobacco store and showers being inside the armor, it's not unusual for stores to end up inside the armor where there's extra space. Typically, I believe this is because the extra space is left over for layout reasons, and they just fill it with whatever is left over. So it's not "we need more volume inside the armor" as much as it is "when we've wrapped the box around engines and magazines, we have this much space left over", and we'll put stuff there. Iowa's marine berthing is inside the armored box, too, just because that's where they had space. The showers may be slightly different. I wonder if those are armored for NBC decontamination reasons. As for the ops room, that basically didn't exist when she was designed in the 30s, and there may not have been a suitable place under the armor for it. I know this happened quite a bit to the US as C2 spaces grew.
I'm not too surprised that verbal conning was the norm. It still is today in most cases. Iowa has a remote setup for passing helm orders, but I think it's mostly for cases where the ship is being conned well away from the helm, like on the flying bridge.