4 Years After Fire, Minster Opens Again

When surveyor Charles Brown saw the damage done to his beloved York Minster by a fire during the night of July 9, 1984, he broke down and wept.

Four years later, Brown has reason to smile at the huge task of restoration that he has supervised at Britain’s largest medieval cathedral.

“When you get a phone call at 5 a.m., you don’t believe it,” said Brown, the Minster’s chief architect. “I burst into tears. I wasn’t alone.”

Fire, most probably caused by lightning, had destroyed the entire roof of the ancient cathedral’s south wing, along with the soaring 15th-Century vaulted ceiling below it.

The magnificent circular stained-glass rose window, dating from the early 16th Century, was hanging precariously in its lead framework, blackened by smoke and with 40,000 cracks caused by the heat.

More than 130 firefighters fought the flames for 2 1/2 hours, braving molten lead and burning timbers spilling from above, before the blaze was brought under control.

The minster’s clergymen joined the firefighters, dragging priceless candlesticks, crosses, carpets and tapestries outside to save them from the flames.

It was the minster’s fifth fire since the south transept was built by Archbishop Walter de Grey in 1230 on the site of two earlier churches.

Now, at a cost of $4.5 million, restoration work has been completed a year earlier than expected.

The minster’s stonemasons and carpenters have rebuilt the roof and vault of the south transept in the original style, and the rose window’s glasswork has been restored to such a high standard that no fire damage can be seen from below.

Brown, whose official title is Surveyor to the Fabric, said it was decided to use oak timbers to replace those destroyed when the transept roof burned down.

Oak was preferred to steel or concrete as it was the only material that met the minster authorities’ specification that the new roof last half a millennium.

“We know that timber can last 500 years,” Brown said, “It is a brave man who will say that steel and reinforced concrete will last such a period.”

Queen Elizabeth II, who reopened the restored cathedral wing in November, was among many British landowners who gave oak trees from their estates when they heard of the fire damage.

Under the new roof, the rebuilt ceiling vault features 62 new decorative carvings, each of which took five to six weeks to make.

Six of them--designed by schoolchildren--show modern rather than biblical scenes, such as astronauts in space, famine relief in Africa and efforts to save the world’s whales.

At the end of the transept is the 22-foot rose window, whose restoration was described by Peter Gibson, the minster’s glass expert, as one of the most challenging conservation tasks ever undertaken.

Gibson, who inspected the window from the top of a 100-foot ladder an hour after the flames subsided, found that it was damaged about as badly as glass could be without being destroyed, but he vowed to make it shine again.

“I knew it could be restored--and restored it has been,” Gibson said.

He injected specially developed glue into the spider’s web of cracks left by the heat and sandwiched each piece of stained glass between two pieces of clear glass before fitting new and thicker lead strips around the panes.

Gibson said his work would last another 100 or 150 years before the lead has to be replaced.

As he spoke, the normal cycle of restoration work at York Minster continued.

Masons in the yard below his workshop were readying carved pinnacles for the minster’s west doorway, untouched by the fire but now shrouded in scaffolding to repair the damage wrought by the passage of time.