Fire devastates famous clipper Cutty Sark
Firefighters were called at 4.45am to the ship's dry dock in Greenwich, south London...
The Cutty Sark, on the banks of the river Thames, has been closed since November 2006 for a £25m renovation and was due to reopen in 2009. The ship needed substantial repairs because sea salt had speeded up the corrosion of its iron framework.
Richard Doughty, the chief executive of the Cutty Sark Trust, said he had been told the blaze was being treated as suspicious...
Expressing shock at the fire, he said: "When you lose the original fabric, you lose the touch of the craftsmen. You lose history itself. What is special about Cutty Sark is the timber, the iron frames, that went to the South China Sea. To think that is threatened in any way is unbelievable. It is an unimaginable shock."
Chris Livett, the chairman of Cutty Sark Enterprises, said that while the ship's decks were "unsalvageable", the damage did not appear as bad as originally feared.
He said half of the planking, as well as all the historic artefacts on board, had been removed for the conservation project and he was confident the ship could be fully restored.
"It will be the old ship. The ship has been through many things in its lifetime. It has sailed the oceans of the world, it has battled with nature through its life," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.