The Titanic: Honour & Glory exhibition has arrived at The Potteries Museum & Arts Gallery and this is just a superb event to come to the local area. We bring you our Titanic Exhibition review.
This brand new exhibition at the museum will run from Saturday 19 February until the 1st of May, 2022.
Brand new to the local area and the first exhibition of its kind at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery the Titanic: Honour and Glory exhibition consists of numerous artefacts exploring the legacy of the world’s most famous ship and includes genuine artefacts from the Titanic and her sister ships and memorabilia from the 1997 James Cameron movie.
Featuring local accounts of Staffordshire personnel connected to the ship including Captain Edward John Smith, Mr Leonard Hodgkinson, Senior 4th Engineer onboard Titanic, who was born in Stoke-on-Trent and Mr. Christopher Mills, assistant butcher who was born in Longton.
The exhibition is priced at £5 which is very reasonable and whilst I have mostly positives to say about this particular display I have a few negatives also.
The Titanic Honour and Glory is an award-winning touring exhibition and from the set-up, inside the Potteries, you can see the air of professionalism that has gone into this display.
Replica cabins, iconic movie props and wonderful stories and history lines the walls but we’re inside a Titanic exhibition and 80% of the exhibition itself consists of White Star Line artefacts and ships that aren’t the Titanic.
Both the RMS Olympic and HMHS Britannic are explored through more artefacts than the Titanic display with Olympic, in particular, being a main focus as the only surviving ship out of the luxury White Star Line fleet that was broken up and sold at auction in 1935.
Understandably Titanic items are very rare and sought after but the focus on the other ships here was overshadowing the Titanic section by quite some distance.
The upside to this was that the ships were very similar in design (almost identical) so that anything from the Olympic would give guests an idea of what the cutlery, menu and other items would be like on board the Titanic.
Movie props certainly added that Hollywood glitz and glamour to proceedings as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet won costumes were on display.
The text says that the costumes were worn by the actors but after working with props and costumes over the years I take those descriptions with a pinch of salt.
Many movie costumes can be production used, meaning that they were designed for the film but never used on screen. These are usually the case when production starts making backups for when (or if) the original screen-used costume gets damaged or even using variations of the same costume for wear/tear over a movie with numerous versions of the same costume being made and used.
There are also stunt versions of clothing made and ‘hero’ costumes. Hero costumes can be matched to specific scenes on screen where the piece is the exact piece worn in an exact scene. These are the rarest and most valuable costumes.
It would be nice to know more details on the props/costumes as all of the above applies to props, not just the costumes themselves.
From china plates to personal belongings of passengers and crew there are a handful of items on display from the Titanic but as mentioned above the other ships and their belongings, not to mention White Star Line artefacts dominate this exhibition.
A key item from the real titanic for me was seeing a nameplate from one of Titanic’s lifeboats and a nightdress that belonged to a first-class passenger who survived the disaster.
More haunting items included a set of keys retrieved from the body of a crewman and a scale model of what the ship wreckage looks like on the bottom of the ocean.
At £5 a ticket I can’t complain too much as the movie props alone were worth the visit let alone the other items on display but I was expecting a little more.
People from around the world are still fascinated by the story of the Titanic and it’s such a wonderful thing to have in Stoke and hopefully propels more of these popular exhibitions in the future.
A Titanic exhibition puts Stoke on the map until May and I hope many more exhibitions of this calibre make their way to our local venue.
Adding in the Staffordshire connection to the Titanic was a nice touch and certainly makes it more relevant for visitors coming to the attraction as numerous crew members and even captain of the vessel Edward John Smith came from the local area.
It’s certainly not an event to be missed and is a superb event for Stoke on Trent as I cross my fingers for many more events of this calibre to come in the near future.
Come take a look at our vlog of the exhibition below:
