The heritage horror story of the “restored” Cutty Sark is today officially named as the worst new building in the country.
The architectural trade journal, Building Design, has announced that the historic tea clipper is the 2012 winner of the Carbuncle Cup, the wooden spoon for the dregs of British architecture. Building Design’s jury, which unanimously chose the Cutty Sark for the award, describes it as a “disastrously conceived” scheme, “misdirected… from the start,” whose “myriad failings…tragically defile the very thing it sets out to save.”
The architects, Grimshaw, have taken something delicate and beautiful and surrounded it with a building that looks like a 1980s bus station. Clumsy and ineptly detailed, their new glass greenhouse around the Cutty Sark totally ruins her thrilling lines, obscures much of her exquisite gilding and cynically forces anyone who actually wants to see her to pay their £12 and go inside. The sight of people pressing their faces forlornly against the smoked glass to try to see something of the ship is one of the sadder in London.
Grimshaw have also punched a shopping centre-style glass lift up through the middle of the ship – and put two more lifts in a new square building, the size of a small block of flats, next to and towering over the ship herself. They’ve plonked a glass pod on the open main deck for a staircase (the old housing was wood, but that’s so nineteenth-century). They’ve installed lights on the masts which make it look like a Christmas tree. Above all, of course, they’ve hoicked the ship up on girders, dangling above the dry dock to create an “unparalleled corporate entertaining space” underneath – an act of vandalism that prompted the resignation of the chief engineer, who said it would place the vessel under unacceptable strain and end in its destruction.
In a reflection of quite how witless and dreadful all this is, the shortlist the Cutty Sark beat included that red thrusting thing at the Olympic Park and the “wrist-slashingly awful” Mann Island scheme which desecrates Liverpool’s waterfront. But it’s a worthy winner – and I am glad to have helped publicise the disaster with this piece I wrote for the paper in May.
We must end by naming and humiliating the people involved so careers can be blighted, funders and future clients warned. They are Richard Doughty and Maldwin Drummond, director and chairman of the ship’s owners, the Cutty Sark Trust (whose dishonesty and utter mismanagement of the project I’ve detailed here). By pure coincidence, no doubt, the Trust no longer has an active role in the management of the ship. Then there’s the forty-watt burghers of Greenwich Council, who rescued the flop – with vast sums of taxpayers’ money. In total this fiasco has cost us £50 million (not all of it from Greenwich) – double the initial budget.
Most culpably, perhaps, there is Chris Nash, the Grimshaw partner in charge – who by pure coincidence, no doubt, last week announced that he was leaving the firm, having “reached a stage where I would like to offer my particular combination of skills and experience to a wider group of professionals and work at a smaller scale.” For your next project, Chris, how about a PFI hospital or a McDonald’s drive-thru?
The Carbuncle Cup is the one no architect wants to win. Awarded by the architecture trade journal Building Design, it punishes the very worst of new British buildings every year, and I am delighted to see that the destruction of the Cutty Sark by Grimshaw & Partners has made the nominations list.
In what has rightly been described by one commenter as a “cultural crime,” the 1869 tea-clipper has had a glass lift punched through it and two more run up its side in a blobby new tower-block. It has been dangled on girders twenty feet in the air and a giant smoked-glass screen run all around it, obliterating the ship’s thrilling lines, in order to create a space they can hire out for corporate events. The whole thing has cost £50 million, double the planned budget, the vast majority of it from the public purse. You can read my full account of this heartbreaking disaster here.
The new Disney Sark - lift tower is the copper-clad building to the left of the ship
As the Queen opens the Disneyfied Cutty Sark today, there will no doubt be much recycling of press releases about what an iconic triumph it all is. So please do read my own detailed article from Saturday’s paper about how the restoration – which has seen the ship’s lines obliterated by a glass greenhouse and a new lift tower and the vessel hoisted eleven feet in the air – is actually destroying the Cutty Sark’s aesthetics and putting her very physical survival at risk. Those aren’t my views, by the way – they’re the views of almost everyone who knows anything about historic ships.
I quoted Martyn Heighton, director of the Government agency National Historic Ships (the maritime equivalent of English Heritage) briefly in my piece. Here’s some more of what he said in an email to another historic ship person earlier this week:
“I agree with almost everything that Andrew Gilligan says about the Cutty Sark (she is not the only air-conditioned ship – ss Great Britain is too, but much more subtly) and indeed you will note there is a short quote from me on the fact that we opposed the lifting of the ship, and much else besides.
“I freely admit that our strong and detailed advice on this project, from its inception in 2006, through the fire, to the official opening has been ignored, and in some quarters ridiculed.
“However, were you to look at the several advice documents I submitted on behalf of National Historic Ships to the Heritage Lottery Fund, Department for Culture, Media and Sport and directly to the Cutty Sark Trust you would see that what we said has indeed come to pass.
“We warned that the glass screen (unlike ss GB’s) would be ugly and intrusive and would look nothing like the illustrations. We opposed lifting the ship for conservation and presentational reasons, including the fact that it would create enormous problems in getting on board, hence the tower… National Historic Ships gave spot-on advice which was ignored.”
Amanda Baillieu, the editor-in-chief of the influential architectural journal Building Design, has today asked (registration required): “Would it have been better if the Cutty Sark had sunk?”
Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian (and Private Eye’s Piloti), says the Cutty Sark has ceased to resemble a proper ship. “It is no longer a ship if holed by poles and hoisted into the air,” he said.
The sailor and architect Julian Harrap, who restored the SS Great Britain, said he was “desperately sad” about what had been done. “A ship is a floating thing,” he said. But the Cutty Sark was now “airborne.”
“Why on earth hoick it up into the air?” he asked. “Why do you have to put these bloody great beams right through the middle of it, to damage the fabric of it?”
The ship does look striking if you pony up your £12 and venture under the hull – the picture that tends to be used – but most people won’t experience it that way. In almost every other way people experience it, it has been spoiled.
Aground in a giant greenhouse: the new, sexed-up Cutty SarkNew lift tower and air-conditioning plant as it will look when scaffolding removed
Today’s Weekend cover story in the printed paper is my take on the heartbreaking vandalism of the Cutty Sark, and Greenwich in general, in the name of witless, bungled, and unneccessary “restoration.”
Here’s the full text:
According to the chairman of the Cutty Sark Trust, Maldwin Drummond, visitors to the newly restored 19th–century tea clipper – to be opened by the Queen next Wednesday – will see the ship as she was in her heyday, “as though for some unexplained reason the crew had gone ashore”.
Odd: I didn’t realise they had shopping–centre–style glass lifts in their ships in 1869. The new Cutty Sark has three. One entire side of the vessel is now dominated by a 30–foot high steel tower to hold two of the lifts, rearing up above the ship’s open main deck like a small block of flats. The tower also contains an air–conditioning plant. In another conspicuous nod to the mall experience, the Cutty Sark will be the first Victorian sailing vessel in the history of the world to be fully air–conditioned. The new “steelwork lower deck, of contemporary design, incorporating an amphitheatre feature” in the main hold might come as a surprise to 19th–century seafarers, too.
Then there’s the glass pod that’s been plonked, quite clearly visible, on the open main deck to accommodate a staircase. The old stairwells were of wood, but that’s so 19th–century. There’s yet a third glass lift, cutting right through the ship itself, popping up on that open deck with a glass pod of its own. The lower end of this lift is the first thing you see when you enter the Cutty Sark, along with a bright new fir ceiling that looks like my kitchen table. All the decks, indeed, are new – the main deck is plywood, with a thin teak veneer on top. A new zinc and copper coating – a copy of the original material – has been placed on the hull to add extra bling for visitors.
But the key change is even more dramatic. Twentyeight steel girders have been attached to the sides of the ship, bolted to modern thick, grey steel braces which run across and along the decks. The ship’s original planks and metalwork are essentially stuck on to this modern frame. The new Cutty Sark dangles from the girders, 11 feet off the ground, to create what the Trust calls “a corporate hospitality venue to rival Tate Modern” underneath.
All the way around the hull, extending about halfway up it and several feet outwards in each direction, sweeps a giant new smoked glass cushion, utterly obliterating the ship’s thrilling lines. From outside, at least in the daytime, you can’t see the shape of the Cutty Sark’s hull anymore. You can’t see her prow. Her wonderful, gilded stern is almost totally obscured from casual view by the glass surround. To get any real sense of the ship, you must pay up your £12 and go inside.
In her years of cutting ribbons, Her Majesty has had to smile politely at many brave new mistakes. But few can compete with this clucking, Grade A, Bernard Matthews–class turkey. One of Britain’s most precious maritime treasures now looks like it has run aground in a giant greenhouse.
“It reminds me of a funfair ride,” said Steffan Meyric Hughes, news editor of Classic Boat magazine. “Just about everybody [in the historic ship world] is agreed that the ship should not be on legs. It is undignified, as well as being structurally inadvisable.” English Heritage has condemned the lift tower; the Greenwich Foundation, which runs the Old Royal Naval College next door, called it “very disappointing… a significant visual intrusion”.
The project was supposed to take three years, and cost £25million. It has ended up taking six years, and costing £50million. The contractors and the project managers have been sacked. The Heritage Lottery Fund, which is paying most of the bills, suspended funding for almost a year amid “serious concerns” over the operation’s “governance and financial controls”. Mr Drummond admitted that his Cutty Sark Trust issued misleading statements about the project, at variance with what the trust has said in internal documents.
But what is worst of all is that for many experts, including the Cutty Sark’s own former chief engineer, Professor Peter Mason, the new Disney Sark actually puts the very survival of the ship in danger. Professor Mason resigned from the project in 2009 after computer simulations showed that hanging it from the steel girders would put unacceptable strains on the vessel. “The lifting support system will do damage to the fabric of the ship,” he said. “It will have quite an impact on it. They should not lift up the ship.”
Julian Harrap, the naval architect behind the restoration of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, said: “They are putting the artefact itself at risk, and that’s a fundamental issue.” Martyn Heighton, director of National Historic Ships, the maritime equivalent of English Heritage, said: “This is an extremely delicate object; we did not believe she should be lifted, and you don’t try out something new on the Cutty Sark.”
Some of the ship was, of course, destroyed in a terrible fire in 2007. But that fire was avoidable; and most of the new damage seems deliberate.
William Edgerley, one of the Cutty Sark trustees, asserts that the ship is under far less strain now than before, when she rested on her keel in dry dock. “At the beginning of the restoration, Cutty Sark was found to be in an even worse condition than had previously been assessed,” he says. “The conservation works have included the installation of a new steel structure inside the original wrought–iron frames. This supports the original fabric and has also enabled the ship to be lifted.” The trust insists that “almost 90 per cent” of the original materials have been kept – though according to its own annual report, 30 per cent of the hull planks are new.
Professor Mason says that dozens of the original planks have had to go or be cut to take the steelwork for the lifting mechanism – and given that the two principal decks are also entirely new (the tween deck, below the main deck, was lost in the fire), it is hard to see how the 90 per cent figure has been reached. Even if it is right, the main problem with the project is what has been added, not what has been taken away.
The air–conditioned Cutty Sark is only the flagship in a fleet of heartbreaking disasters turning Greenwich, one of Britain’s finest urban set–pieces, into a showcase for witless and unnecessary heritage “improvements”. At a cost to the taxpayer of tens of millions of pounds, one of London’s only four Unesco World Heritage sites has been systematically vandalised. Between the Cutty Sark and the Thames, the Edwardian pier has been replaced with a row of production–line chain restaurants, as found in retail parks from Dingwall to Truro. Double the height of the previous structure, the new building blocks some views of the river. The upper storey is finished in that fake gilding found only in secondrate casinos. From across the Thames, the classic view of the Naval College is now complemented by a red neon sign for Frankie & Benny’s.
The foot tunnel under the river is getting an £11.5million upgrade, with the local council promising “feature lighting” to “allow colour and animation to be subtly manipulated to create different moods”. This will, apparently, “contribute to cultural life in the locality”. The glass panels in the domes housing the lifts at either end will be stripped out and replaced with well, almost identical glass panels, only these will be aligned “in clearer association with the [Greenwich] meridian, with each segment representing 30 minutes of the time dial”.
This tunnel is not, in fact, a cultural installation, but a transport one – a job it has been unable fully to perform for the past two years, since it is now closed at night for the work to be done.
The claimed objects of the refurbishment include “improved safety”and a “more welcoming environment”. That must explain why those dreary heritage features so irrelevant to safety and welcoming, the lift attendants, have been scrapped, even though the money wasted on the refurb could have paid their wages for the next 23 years. The new automatic glass lifts finally opened last month, and were vandalised within a week. The council promises that in its new, exciting foot tunnel, every journey will become “an event in itself”. Let’s hope that event’s not a mugging, shall we?
At the entrance to Greenwich Park, what was a peaceful garden surrounding the statue of William IV has been concreted over to make a new entrance to the Maritime Museum. In Greenwich town centre, the covered market, a delightful Victorian–looking ensemble of cobbles and bustling, independent shops, is being demolished for a (privately–funded) five–storey hotel (there will be a new market and shops, but the rents are likely to be at a level payable only by the likes of Starbucks, Gap and Monsoon).
And the “village” market, where you could spend a happy afternoon picking through junk, closed three years ago to make way for a much–needed giant hole in the ground. With a certain grim symmetry, this will be plugged by Greenwich University’s school of architecture, where future generations will be trained to crank out further “iconic” calamities.
In Greenwich Park itself lies perhaps the key to all the fuss: London 2012. The dominant feature here is now security fencing, with vast sections closed to build a 23,000–seat showjumping arena for the Olympics. The entire park will be surrounded by a 9–foot fence, with spotlights every 80 feet and CCTV cameras on 16 foot poles every 250 feet. The arena site, which slopes slightly, is being levelled, its topsoil stripped to a potential depth of 1.3 feet. The park will be closed for four weeks, and the grass not fully restored until 2015.
The trees of this park are among Britain’s oldest living things. There is a row of chestnuts here that were young in the Great Fire. Courting couples of the iPod age now lie beneath the same gnarled branches that sheltered King Charles II and his mistresses. In the tight spaces around these precious trees, against the wishes of the sport’s top riders, the Olympics organisers are driving an equestrian cross–country course. The organisers insist there will be no damage – though 72 of the park’s trees will, they admit, be “pruned” – but they made that promise, it turns out, before doing any arboricultural impact assessment.
Ever since the Dome, Greenwich’s curse has been the 40–watt politician, the second–rate bureaucrat, who wants to acknowledge the place’s significance. But the best way to do that would be to simply leave it alone. Before the restoration there was nothing wrong with the Cutty Sark that a bit of care and maintenance would not have cured. She was “iconic” already. The Olympics may help regenerate Stratford, but holding the horse events in Greenwich will leave no legacy: will not create a single job.
As the cuts start to bite, the default assumption is still that public spending is good. But the fate of Greenwich shows quite how destructive it can be. The Cutty Sark project, thanks to its extraordinary crassness and its endless delay, may now itself become a monument of a different kind, a last remnant of the New Labour era when history was bad, money was no object and our heritage had to be sexed up with glass lifts.
I agree with quite a lot of the green agenda – I’ve never had a car, I don’t do much leisure flying, I recycle many of my jokes – but I confess I’ve never got the point of wind farms. As I wrote in June, we seem to be subjecting large parts of our countryside to environmental degradation for little, if any, real C02 benefit.
The average wind farm operates to only about a quarter of its capacity- because the wind often doesn’t blow. And even when it does blow, that can be at times – overnight, for instance – when the electricity it generates isn’t needed. (We can’t store electricity in large quantities – the power companies have to generate it at the exact moment when you want to use it.)
Now, as I reported in yesterday’s paper, there’s interesting news from the original Wind farm Central, Denmark. In the country with the world’s highest density of turbines per head, the political wind appears to be changing. The Danish government is phasing out the Gale Force 10 of public subsidy that, there as here, is the real life-force of the wind farm industry. Public opposition to the turbines is growing. As a result of these two things, Denmark’s state electricity company has decided to get out of onshore wind altogether. We should follow – but of course, dear old Britain is still talking about ever more windmills.
The problem with British greens is not that they’ve misdiagnosed the problem – I’ve very little doubt that climate change is real. Even in the unlikely event that the science is wrong, it’s not a gamble we can afford to take. The problem is the unpopularity and ineffectiveness of many of their most cherished solutions.
Wind isn’t totally useless. But as an inherently intermittent and unpredictable resource, it simply can’t provide energy on anything like the scale we need. There are far better renewables– ground-source heat for instance – so why’s nobody talking about them? Perhaps it’s because you can’t see a ground-source heat pump (it is, as you might expect, buried under the ground.) A wind turbine, by contrast, is a tangible, visible source of political commitment and moral righteousness.
Andrew Gilligan 
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