Overview
The bronze plinth here, the Belfast List, was the first memorial anywhere to name all 1,512 people who died on the Titanic in one place. That mattered because no complete list existed when the plaques were designed: earlier rolls recorded the three passenger classes but skipped the crew, the postal workers, the ship’s musicians and the eight-strong Guarantee Group who sailed to iron out faults on the maiden voyage. The garden pins every one of them to a single nine-metre run of bronze, on the quiet east side of Belfast City Hall. It opened on 15 April 2012, a hundred years to the day after the sinking, and it’s free.
The memorial and the plinth
The older piece at the centre is Sir Thomas Brock’s marble group, unveiled in 1920. Brock – already known for the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace – gave the city that built the ship a grieving allegorical figure holding a laurel wreath above a drowned sailor, with two mermaids at the base. The statue is a Grade B+ listed structure in its own right, and later restorations replaced missing fountain elements and re-cut faded lettering.
The 2012 addition is the long bronze name-plinth that gives the garden its point. Fifteen plaques carry the 1,512 names in alphabetical order, and the honest thing to do here is walk its length slowly and pick one out – a stoker, a bandsman, a child in steerage. That single act does more than any plaque of dates.
The two levels and the planting
The garden sits on two levels: an upper terrace with the plinth, and a lower grassed terrace wrapped around the marble statue. The planting leans on the cold colours of the North Atlantic – white magnolia and shrub roses, silvery birch, blue forget-me-nots and rosemary for remembrance – and it peaks in April and early summer, when the pale blooms stand out hardest against the marble. Benches and the lower terrace give you somewhere to sit and read the names at your own pace.
Annual commemoration
The public ceremony falls on 15 April, the anniversary of the sinking, with a wreath-laying and a short address from the Lord Mayor. It’s open to anyone, and it draws families, descendants and city officials into the garden. The rest of the year the space is simply there, used for heritage walks and quiet visits.
Visiting the garden
The garden is open whenever the City Hall grounds are – in practice roughly 10am to 5pm, though hours shift on holidays, so check before a special trip. Paved terraces and a gentle slope between the two levels make it fully wheelchair-accessible. There’s a free self-guided audio tour of the garden and grounds through the Belfast City Hall app, on iOS and Android, worth downloading before you arrive. Parking is the weak point: on-street spaces on the surrounding streets fill fast, and the paid City Hall car park is a few minutes’ walk.
Nearby stops
- Albert Memorial Clock – Belfast’s leaning Victorian clock tower, a short walk north.
- Belfast City Centre – shops, cafés and the covered St George’s Market a few streets away.
- Titanic Quarter – across the Lagan, home to Titanic Belfast, the SS Nomadic and the Harland & Wolff slipways; about a 20-minute walk or a short bus ride.
There’s a second, very different Titanic Memorial Garden across the river at the Olympic slipway in the Titanic Quarter, where the lawns and timber decking are laid out to show what proportion of each passenger class and the crew were lost. See the names here first, then go and stand on the scale of it there.