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One of the UK’s most popular cruise lines is being revamped to make it “cooler” and more compact.
For ten years, the dockland in Bristol that housed the SS Great Britain, which was designed by Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was promoted as. Brunel’s SS Great Britain.
But the names of all the ships and engineers are being removed and the location has been renamed Bristol Ports.
The site will also focus on the ship’s role in the British Empire and try to spark discussion about issues such as immigration.
Andrew Edwards, chief executive of the SS Great Britain Trust, admitted that some would say the transport system has “waked up”. He said: “Change is not easy, but you will always find people who reject you, but when we were preparing the vision, I tried to find out where the city was and what the city was like.”
Edwards said Bristol was it is often called the coldest city in the UK and he determined that the site should be “cool” as well.
“We’ve tried very hard to avoid falling into a stereotype of what a maritime museum should look like and try to provide something that feels authentic to Bristol,” he said.
Renaming a place in Bristol can be a tricky business.
There was criticism from some quarters when he announced that the city’s biggest concert hall was removing the “poisonous” name of slave trader Edward Colston. It was also called the Bristol Beacon in the same year that a Colston’s statue was thrown into the harbor.
Edwards said people sometimes think that the “SS” on the ship is called a “slave ship”. In fact, he said, it is short for “steamship” and the ship was built after Britain abolished the slave trade.
The new name was announced in July at the opening of the expanded and updated museum, which will not focus on technical achievements – the SS Great Britain is often called the largest ocean liner in the world – but on telling the stories of the people of Bristol and around the world that the ship helped to shape.
It will also include community group research exploring the untold history of the ship’s passengers and the SS Great Britain’s impact on Australia, India, the Caribbean and the US.
Edwards said: “We live in a very diverse world and we live in a very diverse city in Bristol.” I believe that the job of organizations like ours is to represent this diversity as much as possible and to be able to offer something that will appeal to everyone, no matter who they are and where they come from. An inheritance it only works, in my opinion, if it has ownership in the community in which it resides.”
The highlights are:
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Details of people from the southwest England who built the ship in Bristol, like the Johnson family – five brothers who traveled from the Wye Valley, on the English-Welsh border, with their father to work as shipwrights.
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The ship’s impact on Australian Indians as the SS Great Britain made 32 round trips between the UK and Melbourne.
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Details of voyages made by the ship as part of Britain’s role in international and imperial conflicts, including transporting British troops to Mumbai during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
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Stories of people such as George Moses, a cook from Jamaica, and Barbadian singer and poet James W Jones, who traveled on the ship from Melbourne to Liverpool via Sydney.
Edwards said: “As a world, we’re dealing with a lot of big issues. We’re also looking at human mobility. We’re talking about how the oceans connect us all. It’s interesting to me that one of the fun things about running this group is that we can give you a place to have that conversation.”
The refurbishment and reopening of the museum is the first step in a major transformation to transform the historic site, which includes two docks, into a “cultural campus” dedicated to heritage, sustainability and diversity for the 60th anniversary of the ship’s return to Bristol in 2030.
Edwards said the site would have been referred to as the “home of the SS Great Britain”, so the ship’s name was never lost.
