Once the World’s Biggest Passenger Ship, This Metal Marvel That Crossed the Atlantic and Took Immigrants to Australia Has a New Museum Home

A new museum dedicated to stories surrounding the S.S. “Great Britain” is about to open in Bristol, where the ship is permanently dry-docked

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

July 15, 2026 4:34 p.m.

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In the mid-19th century, the people of Bristol, England, watched a mammoth rise from their docks. Christened the S.S. Great Britain, the ship stretched nearly 330 feet long and weighed some 2,000 tons. Instead of wood, it was made of metal. And instead of sails, it was powered by a propeller. Upon S.S. Great Britain’s launch in 1843, it became the world’s largest, and one of the fastest, passenger ships.

More than 1 million miles and well over a century later, the S.S. Great Britain returned to Bristol as a museum ship. In recent years, it attracted around 150,000 annual visitors, according to its museum home. Now, the Bristol Dockyards, the organization that owns the vessel, is opening a new museum this month that uses archival materials to examine the ship’s nuanced history.

“It’s the ship that changed the world, but there’s always an upside and a downside,” Tim Bryan, the museum’s project manager, tells the Guardian’s Steven Morris. Bristol Dockyards is attempting to present the S.S. Great Britain’s “warts and all,” Bryan says. “That’s human life. We have tried to provide a rounded picture of history, which we think is what people want.”

S.S. Great Britain was designed by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel to carry wealthy passengers across the Atlantic. It took four years and more than 60,000 rivets to build. The ship’s first voyages were, indeed, to North America and back. But within a few years, she’d become an Australian immigration vessel, taking thousands of people Down Under.

“This exhibition is also about the people behind the ship—the people who built it, worked on it and traveled on it,” Bryan tells the Guardian. “Visitors are very interested in the ‘people’ side of the ship—who they were, where they were going, what life was like onboard.”

So, what was life like for passengers on the S.S. Great Britain? For one thing, they had to share the deck with their future food. According to Historic UK, passengers on an 1859 voyage journaled that the ship smelled like a barnyard, due to the 133 live sheep, 38 pigs, three cows, 300 ducks, 400 geese and 30 turkeys on board. The animals ensured enough food for a voyage of roughly four months—a length of time that inspired one 1860 group of passengers to stage a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

The new museum tells the stories of diverse passengers. One is Barbadian James W. Jones, who was sent from Barbados to Australia in 1837 as punishment for stealing a horse, per the Guardian. Twenty-five years later, he voyaged to England on the S.S. Great Britain. Onboard, he worked as a barber, performed poetry and participated in a mock trial in which passengers debated slavery.

“So many people from different backgrounds, from all around the world, traveled on the ship, and it’s so exciting that their stories will now be told,” Shani Whyte, a researcher who wrote the book Tying the Tides: The Colour within the SS Great Britain, tells BBC News’ Matty Edwards. Whyte says the research was “one of the most inspiring parts of my life so far.”

The exhibition examines the S.S. Great Britain’s varied uses. For a few years in the 1850s, the British government chartered it to transport soldiers—first to the Crimean War, then to India, Britain’s imperial colony, where they suppressed the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Soon after, the S.S. Great Britain was on a completely different course, ferrying Britain’s cricket team to games in Australia.

By the late 1870s, S.S. Great Britain had been converted to a three-masted sailing ship, her engines removed. In this form, she twice hauled coal from Wales to San Francisco. But during a third attempt, the ship was damaged and docked in the Falkland Islands. There she sat, derelict, until the early 1970s, when a team refloated the boat and towed her back to Bristol.

“A lot of older Bristol residents tell me how proud they felt to have stood on the banks of the Avon in 1970 and watched the S.S. Great Britain … finally return to where it was made,” Andrew Edwards, chief executive of the SS Great Britain Trust, tells the Times of London’s Richard Morrison. “It’s that spirit I want to recapture: that sense of ownership—of the city embracing again this great vessel that is such a famous part of its landscape.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.