SS Great Britain

Brunel's pioneering 1843 iron ship, beautifully restored

Brunel's iron-hulled, screw-propeller-driven ocean liner of 1843 — the first of its kind — sits in the Great Western Dockyard where she was built. The ship has been restored with extraordinary care and placed in a climate-controlled dry dock under a sheet of glass that simulates the waterline, allowing visitors to walk beneath the hull and appreciate the revolutionary keel design. Above decks, the restoration re-creates the passenger and crew spaces as they were in the 1850s, when the ship was making regular voyages between Liverpool and Australia.

The museum visit takes two to three hours and includes the dockyard museum as well as the ship itself. The combination of the ship's scale, Brunel's engineering genius, and the extraordinary story of the vessel's abandonment in the Falklands and eventual rescue makes this one of the best maritime attractions in Britain. Allow half a day.

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A story
When the SS Great Britain was launched in 1843, she was the largest ship in the world, the first iron-hulled ocean-going vessel, and the first to use a screw propeller. She was also, before her maiden voyage, stranded by a rising tide under the Clifton Suspension Bridge — an embarrassment Brunel resolved by hiring a steam engine and dragging her free. She went on to carry immigrants to Australia for decades before being abandoned in the Falkland Islands in 1886, where she rusted until a rescue mission brought her back to Bristol in 1970.