Mike Oddy was at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic Sunday, showing off for the first time the diorama he gave the museum to mark the 250th anniversary of Halifax’s naval dockyard.
The gift, like the anniversary, has been a long time coming. The diorama is a nine-foot long depiction of HMC Dockyard back in 1813. Oddy began working on it 16 years ago with four other men, and he says he has put about 8,000 hours of work into the model’s construction.
Oddy was the only one of the group able to see the project through to completion, and he was at the museum to unveil it before a small crowd of visitors, museum officials and naval officers.
The diorama shows what the dockyard would have looked like 196 years ago next Sunday, on the day after an important British naval victory during the War of 1812. Oddy, hailed as a “stickler for authenticity,” researched the time period with the help of an expert historian.
Some of the naval officers on hand took the opportunity to highlight the “inseparable” and “complex” relationship between the city and the dockyard.
