New Liverpool hotel a Titanic effort

The mighty Titanic was designed and registered in Liverpool - and carried the city's name on its stern - and dozens of the crew of the doomed cruise liner were from Merseyside, including the chap who spotted the dreaded iceberg.

The Titanic is also the name of one of Liverpool's newest hotels, and the base for my latest trip to one of Britain's most vibrant and culturally rich cities.

A four-star, 153-room affair, the Titanic is housed in a mid-19th century former tobacco warehouse overlooking Stanley Dock, one of the historic, but long-neglected, mooring points along Liverpool's UNESCO World Heritage-listed waterfront.

Developed by the Dublin-based firm behind the spruced-up Titanic Quarter in Belfast (where the grand liner was built), the hotel opened in June in the first phase of the multimillion-pound renovation of this once-buzzing district of the port of Liverpool.

Entering the hotel's airy lobby-lounge, I'm greeted with a beaming "Welcome to the Titanic" by one of the affable receptionists who, like most of the staff, is a born-and-bred Liverpudlian.

Scouse accents aside, the hotel's dominant features are the Grade II-listed building's original, beautifully restored red-brick and iron pillars, and its slew of nautical flavours. Exposed walls are etched with quotes from famous seafarers, such as Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Herman Melville, and decorated with maritime-fuelled paraphernalia, including design drawings of the Titanic and its sibling ship, the Olympic. There also are vintage posters advertising White Star Line, the Liverpool-based company which owned the Titanic and whose old headquarters house another new Titanic-themed hotel.

Yet while 30 James Street - the Home of the Titanic, as it's called - exudes a lavish aura with its chandelier-studded ceilings and a rooftop champagne bar, the Titanic on Stanley Dock revels in its industrial-chic vibe.

It's also rather proud of its guestrooms. They are, to put it mildly, huge. I'm told that the standard-sized rooms are, at 56sqm, twice as big as the ones you'd usually find in UK hotels, while the superior rooms are gigantic.

Despite plenty of furnishings - a (comfy) double bed, desk, sofa and coffee table, plus a vast bathroom with a deep-tub bath and walk-in shower - my room, number 440, is so spacious you could probably fit the entire Liverpool football squad in it.

As in all dock-facing rooms, my windows overlook the River Mersey and the still waters of Stanley Dock into which, back when Liverpool was one of the major ports of the British Empire, flowed goods that had steamed across the Atlantic Ocean.

The hotel is dwarfed by the enormous tobacco warehouse opposite. When it was constructed in 1901, this 14-storey colossus was said to be the largest brick building in the world, comprising 27 million bricks and 8000 tonnes of steel. Apparently it used to have 30,000 panes of glass, though several are now splintered and shattered. Plans are afoot to revamp the warehouse, derelict since 1980, by filling it with hundreds of apartments and installing a garden courtyard.

I struggle to keep my eyes off this ghostly, hulking, almost Titanic-sized building as I breakfast on a selection of pastries, fruit, yoghurts and cereals in the hotel's ground-floor bar and restaurant, which serves a varied menu of modern British cuisine, steaks, seafood, real ales and wines from across the globe, and a range of rum-based cocktails, dubbed "rumtails". One tipple is dedicated to Edward Smith, the captain of the Titanic, who lived in the Liverpool suburb of Waterloo and went down with the vessel. He was reportedly last seen on the ship's bridge, urging passengers and crew to abandon ship.

Adjoining the hotel is the Rum Warehouse, a smart conference, exhibition and banqueting centre, and, from this month, the hotel's basement will host a pampering spa, beneath atmospheric red-brick arches. Another appealing aspect of the Titanic is the dockside terrace, which runs the length of the hotel. On a sunny day, it's a lovely spot for coffee (or something stronger).

If there's one downside to the Titanic, it is the relatively isolated location. It takes me 20 minutes to stroll - past fairly uninspiring, run-down industrial units - between the hotel and Liverpool's increasingly revitalised centre and major waterfront entertainment zones. But it's not a major issue as it is just a five-minute $5 taxi journey. And the hotel's solitude has its benefits: you're unlikely to be woken up by roaring traffic and noisy street revellers.

In the next few years, the local area is set to be further regenerated with myriad other leisure-residential dockside developments in the pipeline. Some seasoned observers reckon Stanley Dock has the potential to become another Albert Dock, and not just because they were designed by the same 19th century architect, Jesse Hartley.

In the 1980s, with Liverpool suffering economic and social deprivation sparked by the post-World War II decline of its once-booming port trade, Albert Dock's festering waterfront faced demolition and replacement by a multistorey carpark. Thankfully, that idea was quashed and it's now one of Europe's most successful waterfront redevelopments and a poster child for Liverpool's 21st century cultural renaissance, its jazzed-up warehouses hosting a clutch of cafes, restaurants and crowd-pulling attractions, such as The Beatles Story and the Tate Liverpool.

On the Albert Dock, I also find the superb Merseyside Maritime Museum, which traces Liverpool's relationship with the sea and its heritage as a major shipping and emigration hub (hundreds of thousands of people sailed from Liverpool to the New World, including Australia, in search of a better life).

I spend two absorbing hours here learning more about Liverpool's links with the Titanic. The museum displays a large model of the ship, personal effects of passengers such as pipes and cigarette cases, and fascinating nuggets about some of the Liverpudlians on board.

One of the most touching tales concerns Fred Clarke, a 30-year-old recruited for the Titanic's band. As the "unsinkable" ship sank, bass violinist Fred and his fellow musicians bravely played on, seeking to calm the panic-stricken passengers. The entire band perished.

It was another Liverpudlian Fred - the lookout, Fred Fleet - who glimpsed the fateful iceberg, just 30 seconds before the collision. His testimony, read by an actor, is one of the museum's most gripping sections. He insisted that if he'd had binoculars, he would have seen the iceberg earlier and could have warned the captain to steer clear of it.

Although the Titanic never sailed into Liverpool, the connection between the two adds another engrossing chapter to the story of a city that grows ever more intriguing with every visit.

FACT FILE

Rooms at the Titanic Hotel, on Stanley Dock, are priced from £117 ($211) for two people, with bed-and-breakfast deals from £126. titanichotelliverpool.com.

The Merseyside Maritime Museum is free to enter. It also houses the superb International Slavery Museum, which exposes Liverpool's role in the transatlantic slave trade. liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime.

For more information on visiting Liverpool, see visitliverpool.com.

Steve McKenna was a guest of Visit Liverpool and the Titanic Hotel.