Cutty Sark

About Cutty Sark

Cutty Sark is a 19th-century clipper ship preserved in a dry dock at Greenwich, on the south bank of the Thames in London. Launched in 1869, she was built for the tea trade between China and Britain, and later carried wool from Australia at a time when speed under sail still mattered commercially. She is the last surviving tea clipper of her kind, and after decades of decline she was restored and reopened to the public, raised above her dock so visitors can walk underneath the hull as well as across the decks.

The ship works on several levels. You can climb aboard the weather deck, go below to the two main cargo holds where the history of the ship and the tea trade is laid out, and then stand beneath the ship itself, where the full curve of the copper-clad hull hangs overhead. That under-the-hull space also holds a collection of carved figureheads from other vessels. For many visitors the hull from below is the most memorable part, since it shows the shape that made her fast in a way you never see from a dock.

Cutty Sark sits right in the center of maritime Greenwich, a short walk from the Old Royal Naval College, the National Maritime Museum, and the foot tunnel under the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. It pairs naturally with the Royal Observatory and the Greenwich Meridian up the hill in Greenwich Park. Entry is by ticket, and it is worth booking ahead at weekends and in summer. Most visits take an hour to ninety minutes, more if you read the displays below deck in detail. The nearest stations are Cutty Sark on the DLR and Greenwich for the train, both only a few minutes on foot.