'I tried the virtual reality Titanic experience in Leeds and endured the sinking first hand’
From the rolling sell out exhibition to a new virtual reality experience, Leeds just can’t get enough of the RMS Titanic - over 113 years after she slipped beneath the waves.
The Titanic’s story is the stuff of legend, since sinking on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City in the early hours of April 15, 1912, her all too short life has been told and told again courtesy of museums, exhibitions, Hollywood blockbuster movies and now virtual reality.
Courtesy of the Titanic: A Voyage Through Time experience, which has docked on the Leeds Headrow, I got the chance to step back in time and experience the luxury, grandeur and ultimate tragedy of the doomed ship first hand.
It was a cold, moonless night in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean when the Titanic took her fateful plunge. A great ship was sinking and her near 2,200 passengers faced impossible life or death choices, but could any of those poor souls, have imagined the lasting impact the tragedy unfolding before their eyes would have on the world? Approximately 1,500 people died that night, none of the rest survive today, but yet here we are - we continue to tell their stories again, and again, and again.
Titanic: A Voyage Through Time starts in the only place it could, front row seats to watch as the famous passenger liner suffers her ever so faint but fatal glancing blow with the iceberg that doomed her - so faint that history tells us many passengers slept through it. The experience then takes you nearly two and a half miles beneath the waves to see the Titanic as she rests today - an eerie, ghostly, decaying wreck. A lasting testament that nature remains undefeated and to the horrors that unfolded aboard her decks.
This experience isn’t all doom and gloom however, as you soon get to board the great ship in her all too short prime, where guests can hold their personal boarding pass, place it in a mailbox and enter as first-class passengers. Inside, you can explore your private cabin, walk the famous grand staircase - there’s no Leonardo DiCaprio awaiting you at the bottom this time though, sorry, and even join the crew by shovelling coal in the ship’s colossal engine rooms.
As a self confessed ‘Titanic buff’ or ‘nerd’, whichever you prefer, walking the ship’s famous halls, was a surreal dream come true and you are even introduced to the virtual reality counterparts of many famous faces including the ship’s captain Edward John Smith and owner J. Bruce Ismay. All before, courtesy of shipbuilder and architect Thomas Andrews, being transported back to the shipyards of Belfast, where you get to witness the Titanic and her older sister, the RMS Olympic, being built.
Back on the evening of April 14, 1912, you are aboard the ship’s bridge as her crew desperately try to avoid the oncoming iceberg, before transporting to the safety of a lifeboat as the ship breaks apart and slips out of sight right in front of your eyes. This element of the experience was handled about as tastefully as it could but discussions as to the morality of a virtual reality recreation of the deaths and screams for help of 1,500 people is perhaps a conversation for another day.
The level of detail, of the ship, her final moments and her wreck, is quite simply put - extraordinary. At this point however, I’ll fight the temptation to correct a couple of historical inaccuracies or the peddling of old, long discounted myths - something, something about binoculars - because as those closest to me can attest, if you get me started, I could go for hours and I can already feel that ‘here we go again’ roll of their eyes incoming.
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All in all this was a truly unique experience, if not a little disorientating. Housed in a big open space, you end up right back where you started, having done a full lap of the room, without even realising it. What it must look like from the outside watching people wandering about, trying to touch and pick up things that simply aren't there, I’ll luckily never know.
So dress up in your finest 1912 attire and get ready to be transported back in time, aboard the most famous ship in history.
Titanic: A Voyage Through Time, opens today (Friday, August 15) inside the Broadgate building on the Headrow in Leeds city centre. Tickets are on sale Thursday-Sunday, through until the end of October.