H.M.S. Belfast is a Light Cruiser of the 'Town' class ordered from Harland and Woolf in 1936 and commissioned in 1939. She served during World War II, including at the Battle of North Cape. After the War, she spent a number of years in the Far East. Following action during the Korean War, she was placed in reserve in 1952. In 1955, it was decided to modernise the ship which was re-commissioned in 1959. She was placed in reserve again in 1963 and, with the threat of scrapping, a trust was set up to preserve her. Wikipedia has an article about H.M.S. Belfast here.
Subsequently, she became 'the largest accessioned object' in the collection of the Imperial War Museums (there's a little about Museum Collections and 'accessioning' here).
H.M.S. Belfast arrived in the Pool of London in 1971, to become a floating museum. It wasn't until 5th December 2012 I actually made a visit! I was surprised to find a large vessel moored alongside the museum ship - the S. A. Agulas. I later found out a little more about this ship (see below).
The tour of H.M.S. Belfast is 'self-guided', but a helpful 'audio guide' is included in the admission price. I found the tour absorbing but tiring. If you do the full tour, there's a lot of stair-climbing. I was surprised how much of the ship is open to visitors. You can descend to boiler rooms and engine rooms, ascend to the Admiral's Bridge and the Ship's Bridge, see how the large armaments were fed with shells from the bowels of the ship and understand a little of how people ate, slept and worked on board. The ship is populated with quite life-like dummies illustrating all aspects of seamens' lives. To my surprise, I am able to strongly recommend a visit.
S. A. Agulas
On my return home, I was able to find out a little more about the ship and its visit to London.
She is a South African ice-strengthened ship built in Japan, completed in 1978. It was a polar research vessel until the S. A. Agulas II was commissioned in March 2012 to take over this role, since when it has become a training ship. See the Wikipedia article. I traced the ship's recent movements from the useful site MarineTraffic.com (live information on the S. A. Agulas is here). She'd arrived at London on 29th November 2012 and then moved to the mooring alongside H.M.S. Belfast where I saw her. There's an interesting stop-frame video of this movement on You Tube here. The ship displayed two website addresses - www.seeingisbelieving.org and www.thecoldestjourney.org which explained the ship's current mission.
Seeing is believing is "is a global initiative to help tackle avoidable blindness" set up in 2003 as a collaboration between Standard Chartered Bank and the International Agency for Prevention of Blindness.
The Coldest Journey is an attempt by Sir Ranulph Fiennes and a team of explorers to cross Antarctica in winter with the aim of raising ten million dollars for Seeing is Believing. The progress of this expedition is being reported in a Blog on the The Coldest Journey website.
References
Imperial War Museums Guidebook for H.M.S. Belfast ISBN 978-1-904897-93-4.
Photographs
H.M.S. Belfast.
(Poor lighting in many parts of the ship made it difficult for me to take decent shots: the Guidebook listed above is full of excellent colour photographs).
London from the Air.
