Museums

HMS Belfast

A Second World War cruiser kept as she was, nine decks to climb through, moored between the bridges.

Also in Science & Engineering.

Belfast was launched in 1938, one of ten Town-class cruisers built for the Royal Navy: 187 metres of steel, twelve six-inch guns, a crew of about eight hundred, and the Navy's largest cruiser of her day. A German magnetic mine broke her back three months into the war and she spent three years under repair. She came back to escort the Arctic convoys to Russia, and in December 1943 she was one of the ships that caught the German battleship Scharnhorst in the dark off the North Cape and sank her. On D-Day she lay off the Normandy beaches firing at targets inland, and she was firing again in Korea in the early 1950s.

She was saved from the scrapyard in 1971 and moored here as part of the Imperial War Museum, and nothing was cleared out to make room for the visitors. You go down ladders into the boiler and engine rooms, through the mess decks where the crew slept and ate, into the shell rooms and magazines that fed the turrets, and up to the operations room and the bridge, with the engineering explained deck by deck. It is a steep, narrow, hot way to understand how eight hundred men lived inside a machine — and the best view of Tower Bridge is from her deck.

Where

The Queen's Walk, SE1 2JH

Nearest station

London Bridge · 4 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• All Hallows-by-the-Tower Crypt Museum4 min walk
• Tower of London5 min walk
• Tower Bridge5 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• The NavigatorsArt2 min walk
• Tower SubwayScience & Engineering3 min walk
• Peaky Blinders UnderworldWhat’s On4 min walk

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