The Cutty Sark restoration raises questions about authenticity
“What an amazing job you’ve done,” said the BBC reporter to the director of the Cutty Sark Trust Richard Doughty.
Doughty, a man who sounds like he’s spent too many afternoons watching Antique Collectors’ Road Show, beamed with pride .
Despite the spiralling costs — the restoration ran up a bill of £50 million — the delay, not to mention the fire, the ship will be reopened by the Queen today.
“People can walk under the ship,” explained Doughty, which seems pretty obvious as the structure has been hiked up on steel supports allowing a new shopping and leisure area to be built underneath, “and you can touch her bottom.”
Amazing yes, but not to everybody’s taste.
On the World at One yesterday architect Julian Harrap, who worked on the restoration of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, accused the Trust of disneyfying the experience of Britain’s last remaining tea clipper
He said what is being presented is “a false view which is more to do with a Disneyland’s presentation of cultural artifacts than their safeguarding”.
He pointed out that the decision to create a chamber beneath the ship could have been avoided by having a shop elsewhere, although presumably the bean counters worked out that this would have been less profitable.
Good on Harrap. Spending £50 million on the Cutty Sark always struck me as fairly bonkers, but to then damage her by ramming great steel supports into her side seems highly questionable. Why not have a shop somewhere else? Why does she need to be air-conditioned and was it really necessary to cover her in glass?
The Cutty Sark spokeswoman was, for a split second, lost for words and then she remembered that when in doubt mention local residents.
“The local residents have given us positive feedback and are very happy that it’s the authentic Cutty Sark,” she said, ignoring the question.
It’s true the planks, the masts and rigging are original but her heartbeat - the thing that made her the poster girl of British global trade - has been stopped. In its place is another ‘attraction’ that will cost a family around £50 a visit when it used to be free.
The Cutty Sark was famous for many things and one of them was she never sank.
After her re-launch today some might ask if this wouldn’t have been a nobler end.
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Readers' comments (19)
This is all part of a more wide-ranging strategy of turning Greenwich from a once-charming, slightly seedy outpost into a tourist attraction for cruise ship passengers. A significant part of the town centre, along with several hundred residents, was lost some years ago with the construction of the ugly new buildings around the DLR station. Greenwich Market and the "lanes" around in risks being turned into a horror of souvenir stalls. So the stupid objectification and fakery around the Cutty Sark is just another symptom of this much wider problem: the developers have got their eye on Greenwich.
It looked as if it was in a dry dock before. Now it appears to be balanced on a glass pudding.
Authenticity? Do you want it to return to the seas as a tea clipper? I think it is quite a striking sight.
The purist arguments for authenticity remind me of similar criticisms of the restoration at Knossos - undoubtedly true but the experiences in both instances are thrilling. I love it.
It's not good and it's not right!
The "glass pudding" motief is unfortunate and the scheme aesthetically shipwrecked.
I would have preferred an inflatable ETFE cushion. Now that we have a bouncy Stone Henge, why not a bouncy Cutty Sark?
The splendour and authenticity of a great ship is ruined.
The headline reads "raises questions," but the writing of this piece sounds pretty definitive - no questions left to answer. It's cute, the hefty pile of britishisms peppered with abject snark, but I'm left with no idea what you're talking about. What does doughty say that makes him sound "antique road show," what is the shop that the cutty sark sits on top of, what question is the spokeswoman dodging (arguably the point of the article), and what are the issues associated with restoration and maintenance of immense artifacts like this. Also, how much does it actually cost? Try at least to get some facts into your article...
I'd argue that this thing was already an anachronism when it hit the water just as the age of steam was ramping up, so it was an attraction even then. It's in such good shape because it didn't have to do much work prior to being retired. So, if it's always been a vanity piece for you Brits, a showpiece for sailing technology built at the end of the age of sail (at the end of the empire), it seems that leveraging it's mythology to turn a bit of profit at the expense of weepy locals is entirely appropriate. As for the look of the thing, recycled grimshaw pudding is a perfect companion: a cut-and-paste weekend project for one of the interns.
There is money to be made by destroying the thing that the locals actually like, not that I am a local of Greenwich, as I write this from Afghanistan, but assuming that I was, there is money to be made by destroying the charm of Greenwich, the unique character of Greenwich, and the things that people really like, and why should large architectural firms resist the lure of that money? It would be wrong to expect them not to. They can justify the outcome of their work with 100 lovely intellectual arguments which prove that they are more right, and cleverer, than us - I mean the residents of Greenwich - and that the gross outcome of their design process is actually an improvement on what was there before.
Hi Timothy
I am not sure if you picked my piece up via BDonline but if you did you'll see it sits under blogs. Blogs are usually commenting on an event that's already been reported on. We had a piece on Cutty Sark last week in BD and the re-opening of it has been widely reported in the media . My blog links to the BBC World at One report. I will link to the other BBC piece where Doughty is talking.
Amanda