Cutty Sark

Few ships were built for speed as single-mindedly as Cutty Sark. She was ordered in 1869 by the London shipowner John "Jock" Willis for the China tea trade, where the first cargo of the season fetched the best price and merchants advertised the names of the fastest ships. Hercules Linton drew her lines and his young firm, Scott & Linton, began building her at Dumbarton on the River Leven; when the yard ran out of money, William Denny & Brothers finished the job, and she was launched on 22 November 1869. Her name comes from Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, in which a witch dressed only in a short shift, a "cutty sark" in Scots, chases Tam and snatches the tail of his horse.

The timing was cruel: the Suez Canal opened the same year and gave steamships a short route to China, so the tea years were few. Cutty Sark found her real fame in the Australian wool trade. Under Captain Richard Woodget, who took command in 1885, she ran the Roaring Forties far to the south to find the strongest winds, and for a decade no ship in the trade was faster; her best logged speed was 17.5 knots. In 1895 she was sold to Portugal and sailed as Ferreira, then came home in 1922, served as a training ship, and in 1954 was settled into a purpose-built dry dock at Greenwich.

What makes her rare is the way she is built. She is a composite ship: teak planking above the waterline and rock elm below, fastened to a wrought-iron frame, and she is one of only three intact composite ships of the nineteenth century left anywhere. A long conservation project, set back by a fire in 2007, lifted the hull about three metres on steel supports, so today visitors walk beneath her and see the full sweep of the metal-sheathed hull from below, a view no sailor ever had. The lifting was controversial among conservationists, but it shows off how sharp the hull really is.

On board you can go down into the holds where tea and wool were once stowed and walk the deck beneath the restored rigging. The gallery under the ship holds what is described as the world's largest collection of ship figureheads, given to the ship's society in 1953. She is a Grade I listed monument and part of the National Historic Fleet, and she usually flies the signal flags JKWS, her call sign in the International Code of Signals.

Getting there

Cutty Sark stands in the centre of Greenwich in south-east London, a short walk from the National Maritime Museum and Greenwich Park. Cutty Sark station on the Docklands Light Railway is about a minute's walk away, and Greenwich Pier, right next to the ship, is served by river boats from central London. The nearest airport is London City (LCY), about 5 km away.