HMS Belfast is an old battle cruiser from World War II that’s been moored up by City Hall, but here’s a quick word of advice to start with: leave the high-heels at home because you’ll struggle with the stairs. The stairs in this ship are so horrendously steep that you can’t even come down them facing the front because your feet are too long for the rungs. It is literally like stepping off the edge of a cliff. (Did they not have health and safety laws during World War II?) The last time I visited this ship I remember my knees were playing up and I was very close to giving up and going home. (Call the war off! Tell the Germans to stop shooting! The fighting can resume once they’ve installed some proper stairs!)
But putting the crazy stairs aside the reason that I like this boat so much is its crew of waxwork sailors. They’ve even got a few real Royal Navy guys walking around and you sometimes mix them up with the waxworks. I walked into a communications room filled with computers and radios and heard the sound of someone going “bravo, niner, you are cleared for loading” (or something like that) and assumed that it was just a recording to set the scene, but then I turned around and found myself face-to-face with a guy doing his day job! There are loads of people like that all over the ship. I saw one of them polishing a torpedo. Another one was checking out the dials on the bridge. It’s almost like being aboard a working boat.
You can pretty much walk wherever you want and explore every deck from top to bottom. You don’t have to do it in any particular order, you just wander into a room and punch a number into the audioguide and it will tell you what the room was used for and flavour it with a few recollections from the wartime crew explaining what life was like on board. You can visit the mess, the cabins, the chapel and engine rooms, the gun turrets and armoury, the bridge, hospital and dentist… even the mundane places like the baker’s and sailmaker’s workshop have been properly kitted out to look exactly as they were in their hey-day.
Mess deck onboard HMS Belfast
The mess deck is my favourite with all the hammocks strung up between the pipes and the sounds of conversations and card games coming out the speakers. You can see them playing dominoes and writing letters back home, laughing and kipping in a quiet corner with one arm dangling out the bunk whilst their mouths are lolling open. I’m always complaining about the noise in my hotel rooms but these guys have got their hammocks dangling from the actual machinery! Imagine sleeping five inches from five sailors and five more from a burning steaming machine pumping out oil and smoke and water.
Operations room and radar
The whole boat is alive with the sounds of life. When you go into the Operations Room you get a flood of radio messages and helicopters flying high overhead, and people barking out commands. All of the lights are flashing and the radar screens are rotating and it feels like something serious is about to kick off.
I love the period music being piped out of the speakers as well – they’ve got old World War II tunes like Dame Vera Lynn floating through the cramped metal corridors and it gives you a real nostalgic feeling.
Engine room and missile room
If you descend deeper down into the boat then you can see all of the engine rooms. You have to be agile to make your way through these rooms because the pipes are two inches from your face and it’s almost like an obstacle course: you have to walk along a little gangway suspended halfway between the floor and the ceiling.
The deepest you can go below the waterline is the shell room where you can see hundreds of them all stacked up ready to be fed up the tubes to the big guns on top. I hate to think what it must have been like working down here… can you imagine? In that boiling hot box filled with deafening clanks and bangs and the rocking and rolling of the boat. They’ve got a couple of water extinguishers dotted around if they made a mistake, but something tells me they wouldn’t be much help if two hundred shells blow up.
Admiral’s Bridge and main guns
At the top of the boat is the Admiral’s Bridge where you can have a sit down in his seat and pretend that you’ve spotted the Bismarck sailing past London Bridge. They’ve got one of those rotating radar screens with orange blips on it (German tourists?). I wasn’t sure what all the other buttons and levers were for but I pressed them anyway. Nothing happened. Nothing blew up so they must be duds.
The highest you can go is the turret that sits above the main deck guns and once you’ve stepped off the ladder you’ll be surprised at how high you’ve climbed – it’s probably at the same height as a four-storey building. You get some good views of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London from up there.
I was lucky with the weather today because I was standing on the deck with the cold wind and icy rainwater coming in sideways and getting me drenched – I felt the boat was rolling around in the North Sea. I didn’t stay there for too long because I didn’t want to get swept overboard so I just had a look at the cannons and the anchor which must weigh more than a skip full of concrete.
Then I poked my nose into the A-Turret simply for the smell – it’s like thick burning oil and it seems like the guns have been firing all morning.
If you enjoy this then try Churchill War Rooms (catch a tube from London Bridge to Westminster) and Imperial War Museum (walk it in 28 mins or travel from London Bridge to Lambeth North via tube). If you enjoy HMS Belfast then you might like to board HMS Ocelot and HMS Cavalier at Chatham Dockyard. The only other boats in London are the Cutty Sark clipper ship and Francis Drake’s Golden Hinde
