The Insulted Cutty Sark

Today I read that the Cutty Sark had won an award as the 'Worst New Building in Britain'. "How rude"! I thought, so decided to pop round to take her photo. I pressed my camera against the glass (that's been described as looking like a greenhouse) and saw there was a big event going on in there, lots of people dressed up looking like they were having a fine old time, drinking, multi-coloured lights flashing and a band playing. I stared in for a while like Oliver Twist (but eyeing up the wine, not food) then decided I'd better move on before I was moved on by someone in 'authority'!

This is what I read..feel free to read it (or yawn and move on to the next blip!)

The heritage horror story of the "restored" Cutty Sark is today officially named as the worst new building in the country.

The architectural trade journal, Building Design, has announced that the historic tea clipper is the 2012 winner of the Carbuncle Cup, the wooden spoon for the dregs of British architecture. Building Design's jury, which unanimously chose the Cutty Sark for the award, describes it as a "disastrously conceived" scheme, "misdirected... from the start," whose "myriad failings...tragically defile the very thing it sets out to save."

The architects, Grimshaw, have taken something delicate and beautiful and surrounded it with a building that looks like a 1980s bus station. Clumsy and ineptly detailed, their new glass greenhouse around the Cutty Sark totally ruins her thrilling lines, obscures much of her exquisite gilding and cynically forces anyone who actually wants to see her to pay their £12 and go inside. The sight of people pressing their faces forlornly against the smoked glass to try to see something of the ship is one of the sadder in London