Sea City Museum — a review
Recently I visited Sea City Museum with my niece and nephew, Jessie (5) and Jamie (8). I’ve been before and I love the story of the Titanic, but I wanted to explore it with two young minds and see if it might spark the same interest in them.
For those who haven’t been before, the museum opened almost six years ago and used to be the central police station and courts building in Southampton. The exterior of the building has been maintained so the entrance looks impressive, and though much of the inside has changed, the toilets were built in the old police custody cells and some of the old doors were kept in place, which looks pretty cool!
Sea City focuses on the tales of the hundreds of crew who lived in Southampton and found work on the famous ship. You enter the exhibition and first see a wall full of silhouettes and faces, to show just how many crew there were. The kids were impressed by the number, and spent a good while trying to find the most popular names. Jamie even noted how few crew were women (good lad to notice!).
The next room details everything taken on the ship — the hundreds and thousands of food items, plates, shoes — almost everything you could think of. That ship was certainly well prepared! There’s a huge cross section of the ship along one wall and little doors you can open to see real artefacts recovered from the wreckage or by those who survived. They loved checking behind each of the doors, but once Jamie and Jessie realised that many of the items had been sunk with the ship and then brought back up, it became far more interesting!
The museum has been designed well with some interactive sections, and of course this is where we thrived. There are two key parts for getting active, first where you can have a go at steering a ship out of Southampton waters — not as easy at it looks! You can also try your hand at shovelling coal, and you have to balance between not shovelling too fast and overheating the engine, but also doing it enough to keep the boat going. A decent workout, and a difficult balance to strike! Anything physical is generally a yes for these two and they took a good few attempts, but we all agreed we’d not have been the best candidates for the engine room!
In the next room the floor is a huge map of Southampton, with red dots for every one of the crew lost, showing where they lived. There are also lots of artefacts to see and phones on the wall where you can hear accounts told of the aftermath, and how the news of the Titanic disaster spread. Personally hearing these first person tales is always fascinating, and Jessie enjoyed sitting and listening to them too, but Jamie showed more of an interest in the items on show and the floor. Once he understood what the red dots were for he was following them around and mapping them out, and saw the full scale of just how many people were affected.
As I’ve mentioned above, hearing people’s own accounts is what always strikes a chord for me, and there’s a room where you sit and hear from three people who were on the ship as it went down. It’s cleverly designed, because the lights are low and the room temperature drops as those speaking talk about being in the freezing waters. Children have a much more matter of fact outlook at times, and though I worried about them hearing sad tales of how a girl saw her father for the last time, or the man who recalled hearing people’s screams, both were pretty unmoved and more interested in talking about how the ship and everything on it came to be at the bottom of the sea.
Finally we came to the room which details the inquiries that took place after the disaster, which used to be a court room and has been kept almost the same to create a sense of inquiry. It’s also really fun for pretending that you’re a judge and sending someone to jail!
We did pay a visit to the toilets, and the kids were mightily disappointed to see that the old custody cell doors were just that, and no cells had been left behind, but they soon perked up when we went back out into the museum. There’s a lovely gift shop with a wide range of gifts and bits to take home, and a cafe for a pit stop if you need it. Alongside the cafe though, sit a long row of historic arcade games. We’d hit the jackpot!
Many of the games will still operate with some money and we tried a few of them. Palm reading, horse racing where you have to turn a wheel to make the horse run. a football game where the players moved very little, and lots more. These were all in fantastic condition and Jamie and Jessie absolutely loved them. They rounded our visit off perfectly!
The whole visit took us an hour and the mix of informative and interactive is very good for keeping younger visitors interested while still telling the story of the Titanic and the crews from Southampton. It’s a huge part of our city’s history and I love that there’s somewhere to learn more about what, why and how it all happened. And both of my visitors said it’s good for children to visit so it was definitely a hit.
For more information, opening times and tickets prices, visit www.seacitymuseum.co.uk
