“MR MIDSHIPMAN Jenkins reporting on watch, sir. Sorry, sir. Permission to mutiny. Sir.”

In a dim eddy of my youth I decided to run away to sea. I read Captain Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy and identified completely with the young hero, Jack. As I cycled to school I would dream that I was peering from a crow’s-nest rounding Cape Horn or aloft unfurling a topgallant in the Roaring Forties. I learnt the name of every sail and every spar. I devoured magazines and built models of clippers, schooners, cutters, anything with sails. I deplored the advent of steam.

All these fantasies were soon concentrated on one vessel, Cutty Sark. The old tea clipper lay marooned, imprisoned, neutered in a puddle of concrete on the riverside at Greenwich. I clambered over her, knew her rigging and even joined her “crew”, as Junior Shipmate (First Class), a young supporters’ club. From that moment I plotted her liberation. One night, I and a band of mutineers would smash the Thames wall, flood the dock, hoist sail and free the old girl from her bondage. We would take her out to sea and restore her soul.

Hence my excitement last week to read the headline, “£11m saves Cutty Sark”. The lottery had spewed forth largesse. The fastest clipper in the world would not be ending her days like the Fighting Temeraire, a ghostly hulk decomposing on the shores of Deptford Reach. The keel would be replaced, along with the main decks, timbers and metal sheathing. The wonders of conservation would be applied to the glories of maritime ergonomics. The yachtsman-architect, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, would oversee the project. It needed only another £12 million to proceed, or some £25 million in all.

Then horror struck. All this money is to be spent without even putting Cutty Sark in the water, let alone under sail. It will merely raise her two metres on to a fake sea made of glass. She will be afflicted with that lottery fixation, a “learning zone”, with entertainment and catering facilities. In addition a visitor centre is to go underneath so the public can admire the ship’s bottom. A service tower will offer disabled access and health and safety will risk-assess rope-ladders, capstans, hatches and rigging. They will leave it with all the excitement of a municipal playground.

In other words Cutty Sark is to be restored not as a ship, which is something that sails, but as a folly. Even HMS Belfast moored upstream has not been subjected to this humiliation. And Belfast is essentially a machine, a floating armaments platform. A square-rigger that does not move is a contradiction in essence. Every item of its structure was designed to convert wind to kinetic energy. Every plank, rope and inch of canvas should be in motion, straining, screaming to achieve speed through water.

This project is surely modern museology reduced to absurdity. The object is drained of blood. The human experience of viewing it is drained of meaning. The curator becomes the high priest, the custodian of the power of an object to excite imagination. He presides over a sanctuary of signs, symbols, audiovisual aids and learning zones. I wonder how much of the £25 million is going on fees, salaries and computers and how much on good English oak.

Cutty Sark is plainly rotting and unseaworthy. Her condition is so bad, say the experts, that the Health and Safety Executive would have her closed in two years. That organisation would have stopped Drake from fighting the Armada because of weevils in his biscuits. It would have stopped HMS Victory from sailing to Trafalgar for want of disabled access to its quarterdeck. But if, for whatever reason, Cutty Sark is to be substantially rebuilt, at least rebuild a clipper ship, not a learning zone and corporate entertainment venue.

Old ships are like old cars. There is a point in their sequential replacement when the original becomes a replica. This may be a matter of obsession to museums and antique dealers, but it is of indifference to anyone else. For £25 million we can surely restore, re-create, reinstate or whatever, a Cutty Sark that sails, using whatever bits from the old ship that are still serviceable. There are tall ships a-plenty on the high seas.

I still dream of sailing in one. Travel cannot conceivably offer a more exhilarating experience than a three-masted square-rigger under sail in a strong wind. I appreciate that not many people can derive that lottery benefit, but how many benefit from Churchill papers “saved” from the Americans or archives buried in a museum basement? A restored Cutty Sark could delight visitors in harbours throughout Britain. There is no delight in a glass dock and visitors gazing at the ship’s backside.

Conservationists are becoming a new clergy that have lost sight of reality. Noble organisations such as English Heritage, the National Trust and the great museums regard the property they manage as theirs, not the public’s. They strip it and dress it in corporate clothes, in cases and storerooms, hidden in the language of placards and guidebooks. They withdraw public goods into a private realm. They control what visitors experience.

I see it in ruins which no one dares rebuild to lend them meaning to laymen. I see it in historic houses where no one lives, kitchens where no one cooks, library books never read, Old Masters never viewed, ballrooms bereft of dancing and stables bereft of horses. Everywhere we see the public waiting patiently to be told what to experience, what to think, how to respond. The original essence of a place, the purpose of an object, is gone, stolen by a profession in its craving to study and control.

The proposed Cutty Sark is the syndrome gone mad. This majestic antique should be rebuilt fit to sail, nothing less. She should never be condemned to toytown. So be warned. If you see a man with a sledgehammer at Greenwich dock one night, it is a heartbroken sailor out to rescue a grand old dame who has fallen among thieves.



simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk

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