Ship Figureheads

French battleship Ocean.

The figurehead of HMS Warrior. Other than HMS Rodney, HMS Warrior and her sistership HMS Black Prince were the last British battleships to carry the feature.

French schooner Recouvrance.

The Christian Radich's figurehead.

SS Great Britain figurehead, port side.

The Seute Deern's figurehead.

Figurehead hall of the Naval Museum, Karlskrona, Sweden.

Britannia.

Amanda Fenwick.

Indian Princess.

'Juan Sebastian de Elcano - Spain 370 feet Top sail schooner steel hull built 1927.

Armed frog figurehead of schooner Larinda.

Barquentine Dewaruci East Java 191 feet 1952.

The Cutty Sark (left). Not sure about the one on the right.

Carved prows of Viking longships.

Nelson's flagship HMS Victory (left). British frigate Unicorn (right).

Various dames.

HMS Lion. HMS Neptune. HMS Ajax.

Left: Prince Henry the Navigator figurehead from "Sagres II", Portugal, 1937... Right: monk figurehead from Amerigo-Vespucci, 1931.

Here’s a sight familiar to residents of, and visitors to, the Canadian city of Vancouver. This carving of a sea dragon, located in Stanley Park, is a replica of the figurehead of the Empress of Japan, which sailed back and forth from Canada’s west coast to Asia from the early 1890’s until 1922.

And speaking of Asia, here are some examples of figureheads from Thailand, displayed on barges used by the royal family. This first one dates from the mid-sixteenth century.

That's all, folks! Keep a sharp look-out, won't you?

The Cutty Sark: hoist the main sail!

The Cutty Sark has survived storms, pounding oceans and even fire. As the restored tea clipper reopens in Greenwich, Steve Rose explores our new appetite for nautical museums

Steve Rose

guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 19.00 BST


The Concorde of its age … the new space beneath the Cutty Sark. Photograph: Jim Stephenson

We do love our nautical history. Just as it surrounds our isles, so the sea surrounds the myths of who and what made Britain great, from Horatio Nelson to James Cook, from Francis Drake to Charles Darwin – and, most recently, the Titanic. Never mind that this last was a catastrophe: its centenary has been celebrated like a jubilee. Perhaps we need to keep telling ourselves these seafaring stories now that Britain is not so great, and our shipbuilding industry is all but extinct.

But if we can't build new ships any more, we can at least build museums to old ones. And a whole fleet of them has been launched of late. There's Belfast's flashy Titanic visitor attraction, whose design seems a fusion of the vessel and the iceberg; and Southampton's SeaCity Museum, which plays up its own Titanic connection (500 households in the city lost a family member). Now, in their wake, comes the rejuvenated Cutty Sark in Greenwich, which opens to the public on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Mary Rose Museum is due to open in Portsmouth next year; this is dedicated to Henry VIII's flagship, raised from the Solent in 1982, having sunk nearly half a millennium earlier.

The Cutty Sark's prolonged overhaul took on a different complexion after the museum caught fire in May 2007. TV images of flames engulfing the clipper prompted a sympathetic bout of public and private wallet-emptying, meeting the restoration's final cost of £50m, twice the original estimate. Pirates of The Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer even chipped in by lending some of his photos for an exhibition to raise funds. Mercifully, there was enough of the Cutty Sark left to restore, most of the ship having been dismantled and taken away at the time of the blaze.

And here it is, back in Greenwich at last, tall masts soaring over the National Maritime Museum, bowsprit pointed across the Thames towards Canary Wharf. Except now the 143-year-old ship appears to be raised up on a skirt of glass, as if floating on its own viscous little ocean. As generations of school-trippers doubtless remember, the tea clipper's rich history was previously told inside the vessel itself; with the ship three metres up in the air, the vessel is now integrated into a larger museum that extends below the glass and underneath its hull.

This strategy has irked some purists – of which, this being British maritime history, there are many, from the Duke of Edinburgh downwards. A ship belongs in water, many say, or at least a ship should be allowed to remain a ship. Others feared raising the craft would damage its structure (among them architect Julian Harrap, who designed a similar set-in-glass home for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Britain in Bristol). But there the glass was flat and at street level, giving a suggestion of water. The Cutty Sark's glass bubble doesn't particularly evoke water, nor is it transparent enough to make the lower half of the hull easily visible to outsiders. If anything, it gives the impression that the ship has been converted into a hovercraft. It's no longer a ship, nor quite a building, but some bizarre hybrid of the two.

There was little alternative, say Grimshaw Architects, best known for Cornwall's Eden Project. The Cutty Sark was too corroded to be seaworthy; having been out of the water for so long, its hull was out of shape and the structure unsafe. In addition, explains Nicholas Grimshaw, to justify the expensive restoration, the new Cutty Sark needed a viable business plan. "The critical thing, as we learned with Eden, is not so much getting together the capital, it's getting the thing to run. If it can't sustain itself, you've had it. However beautifully we did it up, we had to extend its reach in some way and make a commercial success of it."

School trips weren't going to cover it. In today's climate, you need to host corporate events and the like to keep such an attraction going, so the new space created beneath the ship doubles as a venue for hire. Fears over the ship itself have at least been assuaged. Its 12 pairs of supporting steel arms link with a new steel skeleton on the inside, which takes the load off the original hull.

Once you get inside, the romance and discomfort of 19th-century seafaring are palpable. One is led through the hold, up along the low-ceilinged middle deck and out on to the top, with artefacts and displays telling the ship's story along the way – bringing tea from China and wool from Australia, being sold to a Portuguese company, then rescued and brought home in the 1920s. Ship and building are intertwined, through a joint effort of painstaking traditional craftsmanship and hi-tech modern design; but the old and new are clearly distinguishable. The steel is painted dark grey, while the original, corroded ironwork is white. Other new additions, such as a disabled lift and fire escapes, are expressed in steel and glass, in contrast to the original's warm brass and wood.

What's been lost at street level has arguably been gained beneath: a dramatic, light-filled hall with stepped sides and a ship poking through its glass roof. It might be just what the corporate-function market is after, but it's also a powerful and memorable space for the visitor. There's something bracing about standing "underwater" and looking up along the ship's copper-lined keel. Suddenly, you can appreciate just how sleek and streamlined a vessel she is. "It was sort of the Concorde of its age," says Grimshaw. "It was an amazingly fast ship."

Grimshaw is no stranger to fusing naval and conventional architecture. The masts and riggings of tall ships – seen as lightweight, economical supports – were key to the 1980s British high-tech movement in which Grimshaw made his name, along with Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. One of Grimshaw's first buildings was Oxford Ice Rink, whose roof was held up by distinctly nautical-looking masts. He remembers using a slide of the Cutty Sark in talks to illustrate the glazing structure of his celebrated Financial Times printworks, whose columns were created by mast-makers; the screens of his British Pavilion for the 1992 Seville Expo were the work of sail-makers. It's little surprise to learn Grimshaw is a keen sailor.

This crossover is a reminder that Britannia's historic ruling of the waves is also a story of design. The imperative for seafaring supremacy fuelled domestic innovation; it could even have kickstarted the Industrial Revolution. The copper lining of the Cutty Sark's hull, for example, was a military secret that gave Britain the edge: such boats resisted barnacles, making them faster than their rivals. To maintain the secret, though, only British copper could be used, driving the domestic mining industry. "Technical development," says Grimshaw, "was very important for staying on top – for going faster, for holding more."

Ironically, it was a design flaw that immortalised the Mary Rose. The general consensus is that Henry VIII's flagship sank in 1545 after taking in water through her open gun ports: modifications and overloading had made the ship unstable and a strong wind tipped her over. While the Cutty Sark marks the close of Britain's maritime golden age, the Mary Rose represents its beginnings, when Henry VIII first began to build a serious Royal Navy. The 18,000 artefacts retrieved from the ship also represent an unparalleled time capsule of Tudor life, from nit combs to longbows to the skeleton of the ship's dog.

Only half the hull of the Mary Rose survives, so, unlike the Cutty Sark, it has been possible to enclose it in a simple building, even if that building had to be constructed over the dry dock where the vessel has sat since 1982, too fragile to move, its hull being continuously sprayed to prevent it drying out. The new museum is a smooth, low, oval shell that sits unobtrusively in Portsmouth's historic dockyard. Its exterior is clad in long planks of dark, stained timber, much like the Mary Rose herself; but, otherwise, it's not excessively boat-like. "We all felt that what was important about this museum was what was inside," explains Chris Wilkinson, of architects Wilkinson Eyre.

Wilkinson Eyre were also behind Southampton's SeaCity, a conversion of the city's 1930s magistrates' court. But Wilkinson, like Grimshaw, disagrees that Britain is overdoing its seafaring nostalgia. "Maybe it wasn't thought of as important enough in the past," he says. "Technology has also made it easier to discover these boats, bring them up to the surface, and tell the stories that went with them."

As a measure of the influence of all these ships, one need only look at the cities in which these museums are sited: London, Portsmouth, Southampton, Belfast, Bristol. All have been shaped – literally as well as metaphorically – by their seafaring pasts, nowhere more so than at Greenwich where the Cutty Sark now resides, a stone's throw from Christopher Wren's Old Royal Naval College (and, up on the hill, his observatory, from where the Greenwich Meridian takes off).

It all adds up to a neatly choreographed landscape of British power, though there's more to this story than simply how the nation found its might and then lost it again. The recent installation of Yinka Shonibare's Ship in a Bottle – a replica of Nelson's Victory, with African-patterned cloth for sails – near the Cutty Sark site reminds us that there are less appetising sides to the seafaring story missing from this picture, chiefly the slave trade. Architecture tends to set history in stone; these vessels keep it in motion.