York Minster's new exhibition, Out of the Ashes, and photo trail, On This Spot, explores the 1984 fire that threatened to destroy York Minster.
The Yoroshire Post speaks to curator Kirsty Mitchell, and John David, Master Mason Emeritus
The Yoroshire Post speaks to curator Kirsty Mitchell, and John David, Master Mason Emeritus
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00:00My name's Kirsty Mitchell, I'm the curator in the Minster's Collections and Interpretation team
00:04and we are stood in our new exhibition, Out of the Ashes, which tells the story
00:09of the 1984 South Transept fire. The exhibition tells the story of the night, the fire and how
00:16firefighters fought it, through to the morning after and what do you do then,
00:22the clean-up operation, how services began again, public appeal and then on to the four-year
00:28restoration that saw the South Transept back to how it is today. It's 2.30am, the automatic fire
00:35alarm goes off and the flames take hold of the South Transept roof and by half five in the
00:48morning the fire's under control. You say that now, it sounds relatively quick, but I'm sure
00:53it didn't feel like that and during that time the entire vault and roof comes down so the South
00:59Transept is left open to the elements. The fire service took the decision to position jets in such
01:07a way that it brought timbers down to prevent the spread. If it gets beyond the central tower,
01:12really the whole building's at risk, so I can't imagine what it would have been like to take that
01:18decision, but it worked. Four years, which is actually a year ahead of schedule, I think it
01:25maybe sounds a long time but it's amazingly short when you think about all the work that had to go
01:29into it for both the roof, the vault and the rose window. It's been really emotional actually because
01:35I think we've all got those images of Notre Dame almost quite fresh in the mind and
01:40you're going through this, you can't help but wonder what I would have
01:45done if I was there or what it would have been like. It's still such a part of the Minster and
01:51the city's living and kind of collective memory. Yeah, really powerful experience. My name is John
01:57David, I'm a master mason emeritus. At the time of the fire I was a stonemason here, already doing
02:06various investigative work into the design of the stonework for new stonework to be produced.
02:13The evening of the fire, it was a very hot, very humid night, quite extraordinary weather
02:21I think. There was no rain, some people had reported there was no rain, it was just
02:28humid weather. Thunder had been reported but ball lightning had been seen in the sky.
02:35I didn't see that, I was asleep at the time. I was awoken about 2am by a local neighbour
02:43I live very close to the Minster who said that the South Transept was on fire.
02:48I thought it was going to be children, the doorbell just being a nuisance but
02:53persistent ringing caused me to answer the door and so eventually myself and my wife went out
02:59to look at the South Transept from the west end and you could see the flames coming out just in
03:05part of the roof. Immediately I thought I work here, perhaps I should be doing something so I
03:12went around the back of the Minster through the park into the back and met other colleagues at
03:19the Minster and staff members and clergy who were actually removing anything from the Minster that
03:27we could actually move because we didn't know the extent of the fire, how far it would go at that
03:32time so any valuables or anything movable we were actually taking out the building. But the actual
03:38restoration once we had the power to actually do it we were just relishing it and looking
03:45forward to having an opportunity to restore it. We don't often have a chance to do a roof
03:55and the joinery department
04:02expanded in order to actually do the vaulted roof and the outside roof
04:08we actually had about 25 to 30 people working on that and did an extraordinary job which you can
04:15see now. That's what we do when we restore the Minster, we respect the fact that what we take
04:21away might have been there for many hundreds of years, we're very very particular about putting
04:29back exactly what might have been there before. It's not just an imitation or not
04:38something that will fit, it's a reproduction of what the original builders built and it's 40
04:46years since the fire took away the last roof but hopefully that'll be up there for several
04:53hundred years yet. That's the timeline we work on.