Overview

This museum is located in the old White Star Line building in Cobh (formerly Queenstown), which is where people would have bought their tickets for a journey on the company's liners. Cobh/Queenstown was the Titanic's last stop before the ship came to grief in the mid-Atlantic, and the museum focuses particularly on the Irish passengers who boarded there. At the beginning, you are given a 'boarding pass' with one of the real Queenstown passengers' names on it, and after you have worked your way through the various video presentations, recreations of Titanic cabins and displays of artefacts, you find out whether the passenger on your boarding pass survived the sinking. As a wheelchair/scooter using visitor, I felt able to join in with all parts of the experience at the museum. There's a wheelchair lift to get into the building which you can operate yourself (unlike some places where you have to send in a person who can climb stairs to ask for help, which isn't really proper access). When you get inside, it's sometimes a little tight around the corners, but given the importance of housing the museum in the historic setting of the White Star Line museum, I felt that a good job had been done in making the access as good as possible.

Transport & Parking

The museum doesn't have its own car park, but there is a place where wheelchair users can be dropped off outside and it didn't prove too tricky to find a blue badge space on a street nearby.

Access

There was a ramp up to the front door and then a wheelchair lift up to the museum level. The museum is all on one floor. Bit tight round the corners in places but pretty good in general.

Toilets

The accessible loo was OK. Bit small and tight to manoeuvre, but clean, and the rails were OK for me. From what I could tell, I think this is the only loo in the museum, so the drawback was that there was a queue of people outside when I came out - many with babies in pushchairs. There is a council toilet block nearby on the waterfront, though, so maybe that would have been OK instead.

Staff

I found the staff helpful and friendly, and I'd like to give a big shout out to the staff member who phoned me the day before our visit to say that we should allow extra time to get there because of roadworks on the routes around nearby Cork and into Cobh - she wasn't wrong!

Anything else you wish to tell us?

I'm writing this a few weeks after our visit, so things have probably changed now, but when we went, Ireland in general was very strict about mask-wearing, and this was well observed inside the Titanic Experience.

Photos