SS Great Britain

When she was launched in Bristol in 1843, the SS Great Britain was by far the largest ship ever built, and the most daring. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed her for the Great Western Steamship Company's Atlantic service, and in doing so became the first to combine two new technologies in a large ocean-going ship: an iron hull and a screw propeller. She was 322 feet long, displaced around 3,400 tons, and in 1845 became the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic, in 14 days. From 1845 to 1853 she was the largest passenger ship in the world.

Her working life was long and hard. The company that built her was forced out of business after she ran aground in Dundrum Bay, County Down, in 1846. Sold and refitted, she carried thousands of emigrants to Australia from 1852, was converted to sail in 1881, and ended her career in the Falkland Islands as a warehouse and coal hulk before being scuttled in 1937. In 1970, with money from Sir Jack Hayward and others, she was raised onto a submersible pontoon and towed back across the Atlantic. On 5 July 1970 she came up the River Avon under Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge, and she returned to the very dry dock in which she had been built.

The way she is shown today is a feat in its own right. A survey in 1998 found that her iron hull was corroding so fast that she might last only another 25 years. The answer was to seal the dry dock at the ship's waterline with a glass plate, which looks from above like a sheet of water, and to keep the air beneath it at 20 per cent humidity. The ship now appears to float on a glass sea, and visitors climb aboard to explore the promenade deck, the cabins, the dining saloon and the engine. The conservation project won the Gulbenkian Prize, now Museum of the Year, in 2006.

Next to the ship, Being Brunel, opened in 2018, is a museum devoted to the engineer himself, with his school reports, diaries and drawing instruments and his drawing office restored to its 1850 appearance. The historic dockyard around it includes the Great Western Steamship Company's former dock office.

Getting there

The ship sits in her dry dock on Bristol's Floating Harbour, about 1 km from the city centre. The nearest airport is Bristol (BRS), about 11 km away.