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)
The Cutty Sark has been condemned to share the fate of the ubiquitous seaside town flower bed vessels stranded and helpless by the roadside full to their gunwales with mud and pansies for the titillation of sentimental land-lubbers. It is perhaps fortunate for those in the vicinity of the "restored" Cutty Sark that they cannot hear her screams of despair and longing to break her moorings and return to the sea one last time.
This once magnificent historic vessel of global significance has been greatly diminished by her recent development, betrayed by her custodians, punctured by engineers, violated and humiliated by architects. She now lies in limbo, her unique and distinctive sheer lines obliterated by the steel and glass blancmange into which she has been plopped, stranded and land-locked with her keel suspended above the floor of the dry dock like the feet of a hanged man with all sense of her former power, speed and majesty a distant memory. This is vandalism on a level that approaches the destruction of the Bamiyan statues by the Taliban. Farewell and R.I.P. Cutty Sark.
I'd have thought for the amount of money they spent, they could have rebuilt her as a working ship.
I find that glass structure simply very ugly, design is outdated and not very suitable for the surroundings.
The ship itself has been completely rebuild, what kind of authenticity we are tallking about?
It is lovely to see the ship so well restored. We British really can do things very well when we want to. Elegance through a fundamental functionality. Well worth preserving and I look forward to seeing it again.
I agree entirely with r butlers comments, very well observed!
Looking at the photographs from the inside, it’s not as if they even tried to match the line of the glass with the waterline as with the Great Britain in Bristol.
Says something about the arrogance of the architect thinking that their intervention was in any way appropriate.
I think now the only thing we can be thankful for, is that most of the ship has at least been preserved and stabilised and that maybe with the passage of time, that crude and ugly intervention by Grimshaws will be seen for what it is, and be removed and that one day, everyone will once again be able to appreciate her lines as we used to.
We can only hope.
A totally irrelevant design where the enclosing roof slices the ship in half. Original budget £20 Million final cost £50 Million. The Diana ditch buget of £2 Million, not even built on the competition site, finished at £5.5 Million with design fees alone nearly reaching £.5 Million. It was reported in the London Evening Standard (28.01.11) that the 2012 Aquatic Centre original budget was £75 Million, cost to date £268 Million with fees to suit.
Many small hard working architectural practices would love to find Clients like these to whom a budget means nothing.
@aussibum:
you say "most of the ship has at least been preserved", which is entirely wrong. Most of the ship has been faked.
Agree totally with R Butlers comments. This looks like a high profile project where the many vested interests were keen to be seen to make a statement on THEIR project including the architect. Overlapping steel circles is a structural form, not decorative in any way at all, but obliterative, this is the third striking example we now have of this destructive to the original type of design, don't even call it architecture, as it does not even sustain the original sense.
I think it looks fantastic. I have to say I run a mile when the authenticity brigade turn up. If our ancestors had insisted on 'authentic' restorations, half our historic monuments would no longer exist. Creative, exciting and contemporary additions are the order of the day with historic buildings and sites in France and elsewhere. Here the heritage lobby manages to stop too many great projects because they're supposedly not sensitive enough to the crumbling original fabric (itself probably part of a 19th century restoration job). Total lunacy.