"Cutty Sark" is the only tea clipper in the world that has survived to this day. He left the stocks of one of the Scottish shipyards in 1869 and sailed on the sea until the mid-1920s. In 1938 the ship became a training ship, and in 1954 it was turned into a museum exhibit at the Royal Museum of Greenwich. In 2004, a restoration program for the Cutty Sark began, but a massive fire three years later almost completely destroyed the wooden parts of the ship. Then the Heritage Lottery Fund came to the rescue - a fund raising funds for the restoration of cultural heritage objects through a lottery. As a result, thanks to ordinary Britons who buy lottery tickets, they managed to raise a huge amount - about 25 million pounds (although the final budget was twice as much: 50 million). The project for the Cutty Sark Museum was commissioned by the bureau of Nicholas Grimshaw.
The architects decided to turn the Greenwich dry dock into an underground exhibition hall. In other words, the vessel 64.8 m long and 11 m wide was lifted into the air and fixed on metal struts at a height of approximately 3.3 m from the floor.
Thus, visitors can appreciate the plasticity of the ship's hull, which developed a record speed for a sailing ship of 17.5 knots, that is, more than 30 km / h. The clipper itself has also become a structural element of the building, since the upper part of the vessel is located above the glazing contour that imitates the sea wave. Thanks to the transparent roof with a frame made of metal profiles, the exhibition hall is filled with natural light.
The exhibition includes materials on the history of the ship, telling about its voyages for tea to China and for wool to Australia. But the museum is not limited to the Cutty Sark alone: for example, it also displays a collection of figures that adorned the noses of English sailing ships.
After the fire, specialists restored 17.5 km of rigging, 3 thousand m2 of sails, a wooden deck of the ship, and updated the unique hull skin, which is a plate of copper, zinc and lead alloy. According to the authors of the project, the Cutty Sark Museum is intended to remind the whole world of the glory of Britain as the main sea power in the world.
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