I've been following this on Twitter, terrible thing to happen, but entirely preventable. I can think of three recent fires involving 'national treasures' all caused by poor fire controls during restoration.

Windsor Castle fire, Charles Rennie Macintosh Art School in Glasgow and The Cutty Sark.

Surely they must be worth protecting with better fire precautions?

Hi, yes terrible shame. President Macron says together they can rebuild it. The aerial view they showed with the whole of the inside engulfed in flames, looked devastating.

Regards Nick.

Wasn't that the place in Birmingham, well between Birmingham and Coventry ?

A little clarification for you Hopper, the National Mototorcycle museum is at Bickenhill near Birmingham and the National Motor Museum is at Beaulieu, the motorcycle one burnt down but is now near fully restored. Just had an entertaining 3 hour talk from Norman Hyde on his days as a development engineer for Triumph which seemed a good excuse to race Triumphs, they had great success for a low budget operation with Doug Hele leading the team.

Mike

The contractors I used to work for were involved in quite a bit of church work, there was always a clause in the contract that said no lead burning after say 2.00pm which was meant to allow time for any small smouldering fire to be spotted while people were still on site. Did not say anything about use of angle grinders which could just as easily throw a spark that could start a fire several hours later.

This was one that we did a lot on, fan heater got it in the end. Has been refurbed as the brick and stone were sound. Stained glass and all the lead organ pipes were lost as well as the roof.

Before the big footed structural guys get in there to shore it up, let the glaziers pick over the rubble.
Sort each fragment of glass into seperate boxes marked with the position found.
More importantly what depth or layer it was found in.
The drafts in a fire can suck fragile glass from one end of a church to the other.
We found that out after the York Minster fire

According to the BBC this morning most of the interior fixtures, art etc had been removed before restoration, the money pledged is now upto 300 million euro's, structurally the stone building is said to be sound, it will rise again.

Martin P

All on the same day the Titanic sank in 1912 , with the loss of 1700+ lives.

Hi, this issue was pointed out on the TV this morning, the response was that robots would be able to do many of the tasks, I guess they mean CNC machinery to cut and form timbers and whatever other materials that will be needed.

Regards Nick.

Well the 100,000,000 euro's just pledged by a single family wasn't on offer before this happened so you cannot really demand it be spent at all let alone on something else.

regards Martin

You are right Mike I misread the post, I didn't notice the Beaulieu reference