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Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/robertpaulyoung/, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
These massive buildings, built in neo-Georgian style in 1926, are the home of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Tours are available W-F noon and 2PM, and last 45 minutes, free but book online in advance. The buildings stand on the wooded Stormont Estate, you approach along the long avenue from Newtownards Road and Massey Ave. There's a nearby cluster of modern government office buildings, plus the 19th-century baronial Stormont Castle, only open on special occasions.
Parliament Buildings, often referred to as Stormont, because of its location in the Stormont Estate area of Belfast, is the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the devolved legislature for Northern Ireland. The purpose-built building, designed by Arnold Thornely, and constructed by Stewart & Partners, was opened by Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1932.
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Impressive dry dock where the ship was launched, and the pump house which drained and flooded the dock. The pump house has been converted into a whiskey distillery which offers regular tours and tastings.
Royal Navy light cruiser built in 1914 and engaged in the Battle of Jutland. After the war Caroline had a spell in the Indian Ocean then was mothballed until 1924, when she came to Belfast as a training ship and navy headquarters.
For a century this was the "T-word" in Belfast, even more than the Troubles, an unwelcome reminder of a catastrophe reflecting badly on the city. This exhibition, opened in 2012 in a striking modern building, has revitalised a whole city quarter and rescued RMS Titanic as a source of local pride, for its construction and its crew. You progress through the metal-bashing boomtown of Victorian and Edwardian Belfast, through the design, construction by Harland & Wolff, fitting out and test sailings, to events of the first and final voyage. Titanic left Southampton on 10 April 1912, picked up passengers by tender from Cherbourg and Cork, and sailed out into the Atlantic. She left behind a confident Britain that daily expected news of Captain Scott's triumphant return from the South Pole. The museum shows excerpts from films about her sinking, gashed by an iceberg that calved from a Greenland glacier about the same day the ship was launched. One myth that is nixed is the 1997 James Cameron film treatment, where patrician British officers near-as-dammit hold the Irish 3rd-class passengers' heads underwater while the gilded rich are helped to safety and the band plays on. In truth one group had even worse survival than 3rd class, and that was the ship's crew, many of them Irish. The final part of the exhibition has submersible images of the wreck, which lies in two pieces 12,500 ft / 3800 m deep off Newfoundland.
Titanic and her sister-ship Olympic were too big to dock in Cherbourg, so in 1911 two tenders were built to transfer passengers, baggage and mail. SS Nomadic was the more luxurious and took first and second-class passengers, while SS Traffic took third class. During World War I they served as auxiliary military vessels then resumed as tenders for Olympic, until 1934 when Cherbourg harbour was enlarged. They saw further military service in World War II, after which the slow, accident-prone Traffic was scrapped. Nomadic was reprieved because bombed-out Cherbourg was again unable to receive large liners, so she tendered to the likes of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth before retiring in 1968. After a spell in Paris as a floating restaurant she looked destined for scrap, but a charitable trust brought her to Belfast for restoration.
Interactive science museum aimed at younger children. Booking essential.