This film is part of Free
Dry Dock
1000 men and 750,000 tonnes of concrete – now that's some serious engineering in Southampton.
Overview
This documentary evokes a golden age of transatlantic cruise travel. It reveals the extraordinary feat of shipbuilding that was the 80,000-tonne Queen Mary cruiser - but perhaps more importantly, the scale of the dry dock needed to accommodate it. This 'making of'-style feature shows the viewer how some old mud flats at Southampton were transformed into an engineering marvel.
Completed in 1934, the King George V Dock enjoyed decades as the largest of its kind in the world, and was used as a launch point in Britain's D-Day landings. It was converted to a wet dock in 2005, and is now listed. The enormous Queen Mary steamliner also saw service in WWII as a troop transporter. These days she's permanently moored in California, and acts as a hotel.
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