UK Tourist & Leisure Attractions

HMS Belfast moored on the River Thames near Tower Bridge is a permanent floating museum and part of the Imperial War Museum.  It was a famous battleship in WW2 and remained in service for many years afterwards too.
 

It was fairly windy up there on the forward deck of HMS Belfast, perhaps a little taster of what the sailors had to endure when out at sea.  Except the Thames is probably a lot calmer than the open sea, of course!  And the ship was stationary.

Looking back from the forward deck is the 'A' and 'B' gun Turret on HMS Belfast.  Well, we certainly wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of them!  They must have been pretty noisy too when fired.

Now Bob, use your rear view mirror and remember to indicate when pulling out!  It all looked a bit sparse, we expected masses of controls, knobs and switches on the bridge.  And where's the CD/radio?
 

Watch out Mike, enemy at 2 o'clock!  Mike had great fun swinging the ship's gun around, mind you it took ages to move on account of the low gearing, by the time the enemy would have been lined up they'd probably have fired first!

This is a picture of Belinda flashing!  It's one of those big lights with a shutter that's operated to signal to the allies in Morse Code during battle.  We wonder if it could also be used to dazzle the enemy when they're trying to fire at you.
 

Ahoy there, Captain Birdseye!  Mike here keeping a lookout on the other bridge on HMS Belfast.  This looked like the bridge where they did the navigation, no computers or GPS in those days then, just charts, rulers and the phone to ring and ask "are we there yet"?

Here's the HMS Belfast radio equipment room with a sailor technician repairing it.  Just look at the size of those old fashioned rack units!  Hard to work on with just that red light though.  This area was well into the bowels of the ship, to protect it from damage during battle.
 

Belinda looking round the engine room on HMS Belfast - and she thought computers were complicated!  Everywhere was a mass of gantries, pipes, gauges, boilers, gears and levers, a real plumber's nightmare!

Here's the control station for monitoring the engine, again all very complicated looking, and Bob thought his car was complicated!  Now, how do you switch on the air conditioning?  Er, don't press that big red butt....
 

Sleeping over your eating quarters means you can just drop in for breakfast!  However, eating under a sea-sick or hung over sailor is a worry, maybe they just tied them up in their hammocks like in this picture.

The Shell and Magazine room lie well below the waterline and protected by heavy armour, which is just as well as the consequences of that lot going up just doesn't bear thinking about!  The shells were transported up to the guns by those tubes behind them.

It was getting dark when we finally left HMS Belfast, turning back to take one last look (and photo) as we made our way to London Bridge station for the journey home.

We spent many interesting hours on HMS Belfast, it was well worth visiting, even for non-battleship geeks like us!

Don't forget to check out the HMS Belfast website and other London tourist sites from our UK tourist links page.

We also have some videos of our visit, accessed from our video clips page.