The Fascinating History of Titanic Hotel Liverpool #Liverpool
The RMS Titanic might well be one of the most famous ships ever to sail the seven seas. Considered to be ‘unsinkable’ when it was built, its journey across the Atlantic Ocean was interrupted when it hit an iceberg and promptly sank.
Although other ships have sunk since, taking more lives than the Titanic did, the vessel’s tragic story has remained one of the great prominence in the minds of many. The fact that the story was made into a blockbuster movie by James Cameron, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and others, certainly helped.
You might think that there would be a desire to push the story of the fated ship away from the mindset of those visiting cities with a link to it, but in truth the opposite is true.
It was built in Belfast and the Northern Irish capital has a museum dedicated to the creation of such an impressive vessel. It was registered to sail out of Liverpool, thanks to the fact that the White Star Line who owned it had their headquarters there. As a result, there are nods to the ship throughout the city, not the least of which is at the Titanic Hotel.
Stanley Dock
Liverpool was once one of the biggest and most successful port cities in the world. Nowadays you can wander around the likes of the Albert Dock or spend time in the Maritime Museum and get a sense for what life must have been like in the 1800s when everything from food to tobacco and, shamefully, people were processed through the city.
Although the Albert Dock is the best-known of the docks built to handle the sheer amount of goods coming into Liverpool, it wasn’t the only one and Stanley Dock opened in 1848.
Designed by Jesse Hartley, it bucked the trend for docks in Liverpool by being built inland instead of out from the foreshore. The quay warehouses boasted a similar design to those of the Albert Dock, nowadays being considered to be Grade II listed buildings.
Between 1897 and 1901, the dock to the south was filled in so as to make room for the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse, which stands between the older southern quay warehouse and the new quay. It also has a link to the canal, which opened in 1848 courtesy of a bridge.
Part of the Restoration of the Docks
In the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government completely ravaged the country and left cities like Liverpool utterly devastated, the docks were left to rot.
It was only after the arrival of Michael Hesseltine to the city that work to restore some form of glory to the docks began and some degree of restoration to the Stanley Dock got underway. The creation of the Titanic Hotel has been a key part of the docks restoration, even years after Hesseltine left the city to return to London and the Houses of Parliament.
The regeneration of what was once the Rum Warehouse in Liverpool has seen a 153-room hotel built out of the ruin of red bricks and steel girders that once stood there.
It helped to breathe new life back into both the Stanley Dock itself and the wider city, welcoming thousands of guests every year when once it looked to be little more than ruins left over from a bygone era. Both care and attention was given over to making the hotel into the building that it is today, ensuring that the history of the area remains.
The Modern Day Hotel
Although you can learn about the history of the Titanic and its association with Liverpool by visiting other parts of the city, there is no doubt that completists will want to at least pay a visit to the Titanic Hotel.
That is because it is, in a sense, living history, offering up a sense of heritage and appearing as though it could be in exactly the same state as it was when the huge ship was sailing across the Atlantic for New York.
Guests at the hotel nowadays can expect to encounter luxury not dissimilar to that experienced by those who were in the first class cabins on the Titanic, albeit without the sinking feeling that would come later on their journey.
You can head to the spa for a gorgeous massage or spend some time in the bar drinking, of course, some rum. There is character everywhere you look, so it is perhaps not all that surprising that this is one of Liverpool’s most popular hotel destinations.
The post The Fascinating History of Titanic Hotel Liverpool first appeared on Scouse Not English.
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