The 19th century ship, the Cutty Sark, is unveiled by the Queen after a £50m restoration.
It has been 55 years since the Queen first opened the maritime attraction to the public and she repeated the ceremony for a rebuilt Cutty Sark in a new setting.
The 143-year-old ship, the world’s last surviving tea clipper, was being restored when it was hit by fire in May 2007 and re-opens on Thursday, following the Queen’s visit. (picture on left: National Maritime Museum).
The blaze was caused by an industrial vacuum cleaner and led to £10m worth of damage. Fortunately, much of the ship had been dismantled for restoration and removed when it caught fire at its berth in a dry dock in Greenwich, south-east London, and there was little damage to its original fabric.
The conservation project carried out is one of the most complex ever undertaken on a historic ship. It has succeeded in preserving as much of the original ship as possible.
As well as venturing inside the ship, visitors will also be able to walk underneath it (picture on right: Cutty Sark Trust). The Cutty Sark has been raised 11 feet into the air so its hull can be seen. It was the design of the hull that enabled it to travel at record-breaking speeds of 17.5 knots (20mph) from Sydney to London.
The ship was launched in 1869 in Dumbarton and visited most major ports around the world. Her cargo included tea, whisky, gunpowder and buffalo horns.
She was the fastest ship of her era. Most of the tea clippers that sailed the South China Sea in the 19th century lasted for only a few years. Just seven made it to the 20th century and by the mid-1920s, only the Cutty Sark was afloat.
She became a cadet training ship in 1938 and was towed into a specially constructed dry dock at Greenwich in 1954 for restoration work. The Cutty Sark has remained there ever since, visited by an estimated 15 million people from around the world.
The Queen was accompanied by Prince Philip, who has a long association with the ship, co-founding the Cutty Sark Society in 1951 to safeguard the vessel.
He came to Greenwich soon after the fire to assess the damage for himself. Richard Doughty, director of the Cutty Sark Trust, said the Duke had given up his association with a number of bodies when he turned 90 last year but maintained his relationship with the society, now a trust.
“That shows the depth of commitment he has for this ship he helped to save,” he said.
The director added that the Prince had given staff valuable advice from lessons he had learned after the devastating fire at Windsor Castle in 1992.
He said: “He gave us moral support and some very practical advice in terms of how to get the best from consultants and contractors and other sorts of challenges we might encounter.”
The Queen also unveiled a plaque to mark Greenwich becoming a royal borough, an honour bestowed to mark her Diamond Jubilee.