The Aberdeen Maritime Museum stands on Ship Row, one of the city's oldest streets and once the main road linking harbour to Mercat Cross, though Victorian slum clearances swept away almost everything around it except its neighbour, Provost Ross' House, built in 1593.

Entry is free, and the exhibits trace Aberdeen's long relationship with the sea: its fishing fleets, its shipbuilding yards, and the North Sea oil industry that transformed the city and, in 1988, brought catastrophe when the Piper Alpha platform exploded, killing 167 men.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours put the museum to different uses. One traces Aberdeen's rise as a trading port, from Baltic commerce eclipsed once Glasgow opened the Clyde, through to the oil boom and Piper Alpha's effect on safety regulation. Another places it on a darker route, recounting Aberdeen's eighteenth century trade in kidnapped children, exposed by a survivor known as Indian Peter.