Belfast, and the yard that built giants

Two enormous yellow cranes stand over the mouth of the River Lagan, tall enough to be Belfast's most obvious landmark from almost any direction you approach it, including from the deck of a ship. They are named Samson and Goliath, they were built in the 1970s, and they belong to Harland & Wolff, the shipyard that made Belfast one of the great shipbuilding cities of the industrial world and then, for a long stretch of the twentieth century, one of the more painful examples of what happens when that world moves on.

An order book that included the largest ships afloat

Harland & Wolff was founded in 1861 by Edward Harland and his partner Gustav Wolff, and within a few decades it had become the preferred builder for White Star Line, one of the great transatlantic passenger companies. The relationship produced, among a great many other vessels, the Olympic-class liners: Olympic, Britannic and, most famously, Titanic, built on adjoining slipways and launched in 1911 and 1912. Titanic's construction employed thousands of Belfast workers over several years, and its loss on its maiden voyage in April 1912, with well over a thousand lives, remains the single event most people associate with the city's shipbuilding past, for reasons that have as much to do with the ship's fame as with the yard's long and largely uneventful record before and after it.

The yard kept building large and technically ambitious ships well into the twentieth century, through two world wars and the long boom that followed, but the industry's decline across Britain caught up with it eventually. Harland & Wolff built its last ship in the early 2000s, and the yard that had once employed tens of thousands of Belfast workers turned to ship repair and offshore engineering to survive. The Thompson Dry Dock, where Titanic was fitted out, and the pump-house that once drained it, still stand in what is now called the Titanic Quarter, a stretch of former shipyard land redeveloped since the early 2000s around the story that made the site famous.

A museum shaped like a hull, or an iceberg

The centrepiece of that redevelopment, Titanic Belfast, opened in 2012 to mark the ship's centenary. Its exterior, four angled, silver-clad prows rising from a single building, is deliberately ambiguous: from one angle it reads as a ship's hull, from another as an iceberg, and the architects have never fully settled the argument about which was intended. Inside, the museum tells the story of the ship's design, construction and loss using the yard's own records and the testimony of the men who built her, rather than film props, and it stands within sight of the slipways where Titanic and Olympic were actually laid down.

Belfast's waterfront beyond the museum is still a working harbour, and Samson and Goliath, though Harland & Wolff no longer builds hulls beneath them at anything like the old scale, remain in occasional use and firmly on the skyline. Few cities keep such a plain, three-dimensional monument to both their greatest achievement and their greatest loss standing in full view of the water.

Calling at Belfast

Belfast sits on the route of a great many round-Britain and Irish Sea sailings, usually as a call rather than a destination in its own right, which suits a city built to be looked at from a deck as much as from a quay. Fred. Olsen's Scenic Shores of Scotland and Ireland, nine nights from Newcastle, calls at Belfast between the Sound of Mull and Ireland's north-west coast, giving a day for the Titanic Quarter before the ship continues to Killybegs and Galway.

Ambassador's Atlantic Loop, nine nights round from Belfast itself, and the twelve-night Celtic Capitals and Coastal Charms from Tilbury both use Belfast as a hub between the Isles of Scilly, Brittany and the Hebrides, while Fred. Olsen's Coastal Gems and Culture of Ireland passes Carrickfergus Castle in Belfast Lough, a Norman stronghold considerably older than anything the shipyard ever built, on its way in and out of the harbour.

A single day is enough for the museum and a look at the slipways, and not much more. Belfast rewards a slower visit than most cruise calls allow, but even a few hours make it clear why the cranes were left standing rather than pulled down: some cities take their monuments where they find them.