History Shorts: snippets of local history

Catching up on my old home area: I see the old Atkinson's corn mill on the Millvale Road near the crossroads with Joe's Hill and the Doctor's Hill was demolished in 2014 and work is underway on a new housing development. The mill was in a terrible state so it's no surprise to see it demolished. However this little slice of local history can still be viewed in its dilapidated state on historical Street View imagery. The image below is from Google maps imagery dated 2009: Here is the same stretch from 2016: One of the houses on the opposite side of the road has been renovated but the other is even more overgrown. Here is the 2009 imagery from the other direction, showing the spot where the old Bessbrook-Newry tram crossed the Millvale Road and Bessbrook river: Many thanks to Google for making such imagery available for embedding.

Titanic Belfast visit , a set on Flickr. I was able to fit in a visit to the Titanic Belfast building recently and was very impressed with the experience. On the plus sides, it focuses quite heavily on the industrial history of Belfast and Northern Ireland to good effect (such as the Shipyard Ride), the cabin recreations are fascinating, the building itself is of course striking and the public spaces around have been landscaped in an interesting manner. The gift shop, perhaps not surprisingly, falls a little on the side of bad taste - after all, this was a shipping disaster, not really a reason for keyrings and chocolates! However, such a modern tourist facility does need to turn a profit so it's hardly surprising to see a range of tie-in tat on offer. All in all we probably spent almost 4 hours touring the exhibition - it's very in-depth and was also very busy, good to see for business but it made some of the areas quite claustroph