Like many people who fondly remember a childhood trip to see the Cutty Sark I wept yesterday morning when I saw the pictures of the ship going up in smoke. Every time I have been to Greenwich I have admired the graceful curves of her bows and the delicate spider’s web that is her rigging.

None of that, however, should detract from the fact that she was as silly a vessel as ever took to the high seas. No wonder the Cutty Sark made such a good museum: she was a museum piece from the day she was built. I had to look again yesterday morning when I was reminded of the year of her launch: 1869. Magnificent though she was, the launch of the Cutty Sark was as much an anachronism as if Airbus, in 2007, suddenly called the world’s press to Toulouse to inspect its secret new weapon to see off competition from Boeing: a vast new, shuddering biplane.

To put the Cutty Sark into perspective, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had proved that you could easily cross the Atlantic by steamship as early as 1838. By the 1860s, steamships were crisscrossing the oceans with reliable, high-pressure steam engines. By that time only a dinosaur would have believed that the future lay with rickety old sailing vessels, which couldn’t go anywhere in calm weather and lost huge numbers of sailors overboard when they did get going. I don’t remember the captain’s cabin on the Cutty Sark, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if its charts depicted the Earth as flat.

I am all for salvaging what remains of the ship and restoring it. But don’t let’s leave it languishing in lonely dry dock. This is an opportunity to display it in its proper context: a national museum of heroically misconceived engineering projects. In fact there is a large domed building just down the road that would make the perfect setting.

There the Cutty Sark could take its rightful place alongside a replica of the magnificently useless Bristol Brabazon, the vast propeller-driven transatlantic aircraft commissioned by the Government in the 1940s – which struggled to get off the ground and, although larger than a jumbo jet, managed to find room for only 100 passengers. There would be room, too, for a Ford Edsel, the notoriously ugly and ponderous American car of 1958, which flopped spectacularly after being introduced during a recession. Between the racks of Betamax video recorders and collection of Sinclair C5s, visitors could gawp at another hugely popular exhibit: the glorious, gull-winged De Lorean, the Belfast-built sports car that ate its way through millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money but found few takers.

So, the plans are in place: it is just a question of finding a patron now. Who better than a former seaman who will soon have time on his hands: John Prescott?

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