This February half-term, visitors to Brunel’s SS Great Britain can hop aboard the ship and step into the shoes of a real-life passenger with brand new Boarding Cards.

Visitors will be able to pick up a Boarding Card to carry with them while they visit the SS Great Britain, with multi-lingual versions available for foreign language visitors. The cards will feature 36 characters from the ship’s history, with incredible facts and activities based on the ship’s records and even personal diaries from the museum’s collection. There’ll also be interactive maps dotted around the site on which visitors can follow their character’s voyage through time.

The authentic Victorian dockyard will be alive with even more people from the era as the Ragged Victorians and other costumed characters bring Brunel’s SS Great Britain to life throughout the holiday.

Also coming this February half-term is the Global Stories project, a huge new interactive database charting the journeys of over 30,000 of the SS Great Britain’s inhabitants. Three years in the making, the database has been completed using historic passenger and crew lists as well as the private journals kept by many voyagers. Global Stories will allow people to learn more about life on board, and could even help some discover if their ancestors travelled on board the ship. The database will be accessible both at Brunel’s SS Great Britain and anywhere online from this half-term onwards.