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.
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