Windsor Castle Restored - Full Documentary

[Music] yes [Music] [Music] we've got the calls about our past eleven and we thought it's a drill then we proceeded and down the relief road and I turned around to the LEDs in the back and said typical get a drill a day of all days because we were very busy anyway then I looked across to the left and to the castle and I know then it wasn't a drill so I was actually expecting Windsors fire engine to be there and to my dismay there was no other fire engine there I was on the Tod my first feelings was well we have got a serious fire area and we've got to get the grips a bit otherwise it's all gonna go patiently when I first came in here the two turrets either side of the equations were ablaze but it was just seeing that bit of it all just sort of going away in clouds of smoke [Music] from the outside of the building it was just smoking you could see the fire through the windows of the building and some flame coming out of the roof but when you got inside it was quite spectacular because the fire was so hot the heat went straight through the roof so there was a red glow and it was it was white heat it really was high as the fire spread the battle to save the nine hundred year old castle intensified seven fire brigades and 250 firefighters fought the blaze while the world's press gathered to watch looking on the television and seeing all these terrifying flames and smoke coming out of the castle I felt the first thing I did was japatalk on and come up here and one of the worst things I think was coming up that the motorway coming here and seeing this this glow and was been the smoke pouring into the sky and then I think was one of the one of the worst images of all meanwhile Prince Andrew was amongst those who tried to rescue some of the castles treasures while the rules close to where the fire started had been cleared due to rewiring work other areas were fully furnished Prince Andrew was with us checking the roof through the Royal Apartments to make sure that all the personal belongings were taken and then he was actually coordinating with the fire brigade forests portable radio to make sure everything was happening in the right order the first area was this area and some of this had already been done by the time I got here because there were people here and having removed most of the passageway up to I think it was another two rooms that that way including the white triangle we stopped at this bit because we then had farm and based up in this section of the castle stopping it from coming this way having cleared that in it was a matter of then seeing what was going to happen at this end and of course at this end with a fire going in this direction the danger was that it was going to reach the library which is at the which is at this end of the castle and so we were stood here trying to make up one's mind as to which way we were going to go to next when they took the lead off the roof the fire then went through it which evacuated all the smoke out of the Waterloo chamber and the grand reception room and so we were able to go into the grand reception room and clear that and the Waterloo chamber it was quite extraordinary because you could hear the flames since in George's hall just beside it and yet there was the Waterloo chamber completely impervious to all the pandemonium that was going on around it like this I of a storm seemed entirely peaceful and the paintings just sitting there on the wall it took I know 10 or 15 minutes to clear the Waterloo chamber of all the paintings and in clearing the paintings no conservationist today would ever contemplate doing what was happening there the paintings that were above the balconies of the Waterloo chamber were removed from their frames and two people held them over the balcony and there were two people at the bottom who then caught them in any other circumstances we'd have taken about two days to get down we got the wall down in something like twenty minutes but for a few scratches and a couple of small holes or dents really no damage was done at all I asked my secretary to contact every mughal firm in the area to send as many vehicles they could with their men which they did they were actually queuing up down the long walk waiting to be loaded to take the stuff away and each vehicle as it left the quadrangle we had a policeman go with it imagine all the price the things that were on those vehicles was unbelievable three people lifted one of those bronze vases out of the Waterloo chamber one of them still has problem as a result of it and I don't think that three people would ever be able to lift that in normal circumstances I then turned to walk out to see the carpet under way with at least 50 or 60 people underneath it carrying it like a sausage on their on their shoulders but unfortunately the front end had set off before the back end was ready and there must have been two or three people who were hanging on to the to the to the to the back end of the carpet who were just being dragged out along with it I mean they were physically lying on the floor being dragged out and that was the way it went the only way to move it from then onwards was to get the the army huh who could march in step and they marched it down to the stables and I noticed this little girl sentry at the end still in his garden I thought to myself well you know they've heard all these stories about Gurkhas but he was just stood there on Juba castle burning around around him and he weren't going to move for nobody my lads work like Trojans they were in there risking everything when they do their anyway normal fires but this this seemed to be something different yeah a hundred and ten percent all the time some of the lads went in over the course of the day eleven times we're actually looking at another buyer heads if we could take the fire from another angle and we found a tunnel and we could see the fire burning at the end and there was also some scorch marks on the ceiling above us but we decided to that we weren't in danger that we could get to the end to see if we could fight the fire from there unfortunately either ceiling chose to collapse at that time landing on on the floor which we were underneath and to me it seemed as if the floor was coming down a couple of feet it just by breaking down it's most probably only a couple of inches but it was an a stopping moment for a for a few seconds within hours the flames had swept through some of the most historic rooms in the world's oldest occupied castle fanned by the wind it now moved towards the northeast corner away from the private apartments and where the firemen had built their fire breaks her Majesty the Queen had earlier joined the salvage workers but now like them could only stand and watch as Windsor burned [Music] Prince Charles the Prince of Wales raced from Norfolk to join his family it was summer where I've been brought up so much of my unit childhood so when I got here it looked even more of a scene of utter devastation that I would have believed possible it made the blood run cold [Music] I was here as it was getting dark just after it was getting dark and it's the most extraordinary sensation just there was nothing you could do you just had to watch it just just just burn it look it looks like a chimney here and on the night it just looked like a huge chimney with 60 70 foot flames coming out of the top was horrendous but it was lighting it was kept it sort of reasonably light as far as I remember and out sort of it's a very mystical red yellow light that you can get from a from a from a flame no but it was it was a very sad moment for me to sit here and watch it watch it burn there was nothing that we could do we'd got everything out it's just a matter of letting it burn [Music] [Music] after 15 hours and one and a half million gallons of water the fire was officially said to be extinguished [Music] if it's smell there's a smell of wood and steam because they are that stage when they water being put on the fire the steam still rising III have a particular passion person George's all because as a child I mean we used to Mack around a lot in there and play badminton in there believe the run under the carpet there's a badminton you know court market and as I'm know I got a lot of time there [Music] the fire had destroyed one-fifth of Windsor Castle 105 rooms had been damaged the area around the private chapel devastated [Music] 9 major state problems including the great banqueting Horace and George's were destroyed [Music] [Music] I saw pictures and things long before I got there but by that time I had a pretty good idea but the fire was out so there wasn't there wasn't any of the drama or seen thing burning like that did you just saw the remains the sort of devastation which had been caused in the whole of that area yeah I felt that it was getting me a little business trying to pretty baby with a fire barely out the attention of the world focused on the cause of the blaze jumping initially to the wrong conclusion somebody had put two and two together and made five they said that there were restorers at work in the private chapel somebody else decided that restorers meant solvents and somebody else decided that restorers had been at work with solvents and therefore had set fire to the castle we as you know and not allowed to say anything to the press they hammered on my door they stayed there all night they put office through the letterbox they were on the telephone all the time I did feel under siege at that particular moment we've actually tested out the theory that how far would it take for a picture frame to lean into a curtain before it hits the lights and it would have to lean in an awful lot and everybody would have noticed it somebody would have said to the head of paintings conservation Viola Pemberton Pinkett do you think that safe the investigators decided that the blaze had started in the private chapel extensive testing proved that a curtain too close to a spotlight used to illuminate the altar had caught fire within minutes the flames have spread through the roof spaces into the adjacent drawings the area around the old chapel suffered the greatest devastation in the old chapel there was a war memorial to the members of the household who died in the First World War and an addition for the Second World War and all the top of it is a little statuette of Michael and there he was still standing there see now in the wall it slightly bent but I mean he was still that was wrong touching the survival of the statue was truly remarkable for everywhere else the real concern was how to make the building safe we bought in demolition experts who were lured into the building on down the towers because the only safe way in was actually in a bucket from a crane and down into the towers you couldn't go in from underneath in many instances and they methodically work around the whole building making it safe once that had happened English heritage put in and there's a team of people who pick their way through the debris sifted everything into buckets and everything that was of potential interest when we came to rebuild data was that logged identify put into a computer program and put into bread baskets and into storm that meant that if we wanted to put back the major rooms that have been lost the very fine classical rooms we actually had the material and we knew exactly where in the rooms that came from unless you actually went round the area that had been devastated people had simply no idea what was involved I don't know why particularly but they took one look at this and so you know it's not not for it's not for the state to do anything about it was a curious reaction it seemed to me I suppose they were horrified at the size of the of the the damage and and didn't want to suffer committed any any further government funds to it the problem with properties that belong to the government or the state is they're not insured so there was no insurance in this case because the government carries his own insurance and somebody had the idea that if we opened the state apartments in backing Palace and rearranged the entry fees to Windsor we could probably make enough money to pay for the for the restoration so that's roughly what's happened oh they'll only open for ten weeks a year in the five years after the fire over two million visitors have streamed into Buckingham Palace with over a third of them from overseas money for the restoration to castle has come in three areas firstly the opening of Buckingham Palace secondly the new charges that were introduced for admission to the precincts that Windsor Castle from January 1994 and thirdly from savings which we found from within the money which the government were already going to give us for the maintenance of the building so effectively at the end of the day the castle is being restored without the taxpayer having to pay any additional money at all the total cost of the restoration was estimated at 40 million pounds once the budget was set the team had to be found to manage the project we were pointed in the sort of spring of 93 and at that stage it was cold it was damp and it really was a particularly sort of miserable place physically to begin to work in the some temporary roots that protected from the rain and it was it was a very deeply depressing place because you had the contrast of the the beautifully finished state rooms that are survived as opposed to the actual charred remains that we were faced with when we first arrived so I mean a must have looked at each other and thought where do we start and we went round and it dawned on us how massive the task was soon after riding Windsor we realised that the biggest problem we were facing was water and the estimates vary between 2 and 3 million gallons were pulled into that but we realized very early on that water hadn't gone anywhere that water actually was still stuck within the fabric of the castle and while it remained there it was very difficult for us to envisage ever be able to put on Nate finishes back on gold leaf back on wall paneling back on simply because the water would have destroyed it very very soon after we put it back we did a lot of research we have eight probes inserted all over the building to monitor just where the water was how fast it was drying out and it became apparent wasn't drying out at all it actually was stuck behind probably behind layers of plaster behind layers of paint and layers of paneling environmental consultants said it would take ten years to get the building dry and that report arrived on our desks within about three days of being appointed and against a backdrop of needing to get on with the building we had a our first little challenge here Windsor Castle is not just a state property or a home to the royal family it's also a sheduled monument a building of historic importance as such any work undertaken must be supervised by a government agency English heritage the initial perceived wisdom from English heritage was leave it let it dry in his own course of time and oh the prospect that all households sitting there waiting 10 to 15 years for this castle to dry itself out of its own accord was just completely unacceptable English heritage I think acknowledged that this was a rather difficult problem that they had to help her solve and what they did allow us was to put in for schedule Monument clearances to actually strip it back take up floors to take out timbers to take off paneling to actually strip the whole castle back to its bare brickwork and based in work [Music] turned out once we'd sort of honed into that problem that the area's most seriously affected by the firefighting water was in the basement room whereas upstairs the areas that have been opened to the sky for a long period of time they were dry that meant we could tackle the building from from a sort of top-down we did radar surveys to check whether the fire had damaged any areas of stonework and left sort of serious structural voids behind we did surveys using rot hounds which are dogs trained to sniff out areas of dry rot and water and we found many such rollers we then were allowed to introduce fairly passive dehumidification regimes and also occasionally heating to allow the building to dry out a little bit quicker so that that was a huge problem that could have been a major major issue with English heritage had they not I think just worked alongside us in the household in in realizing that it was a an issue which they had to give way on the decision to allow the castle to be stripped back to the original stone was an important one one of the consequences was to reveal some of its history and I've always had a particular fascination for this castle being at heart rather rather an historian I think and I love all that feeling of history coming alive through the the surroundings and through the associations that this place has I think Zeus Emily past generations the castle was originally built as part of a chain of forts around London by William the Conqueror in the 11th century but the most recent major building work was undertaken during George the fourths reign in the 1820s by the architect Geoffrey why it fell apart from redesigning many rooms he transformed the external features what you see today is largely why it fills work what you actually saw on the surface was 19th century and this led a lot of people to assume that Windsor was really little more than a 19th century revival Castle well the fire in burning off a large part of these layers revealed that in fact there was an incredibly complex historical structure underneath what fills outer layers this was most apparent in the kitchen area where a 19th century roof was covering up a much older one what had happened to it was that a white fill had come along and found this perfectly authentic medieval roof but it hadn't looked medieval enough for him this is very characteristic of the way the Regency looked at these things things had to look right appearance mattered more to them in historic building than authenticity he didn't think it looked gothic enough so he added a great deal of purely decorative softwood ornament the fire burned large part of that off and it was clear that here was a genuine very large in got an important medieval timber roof the other find in the kitchen area of course was most significant was the great well we had known I think many people had known that there had been a great well somewhere in the area of the kitchen court when the rubble was cleared a medieval well reaching down 42 meters a hundred and fifty feet to the level of the River Thames was revealed well in a site as complex as Windsor you would expect surprises so to speak and for instance we found a vein of a rich black earth underneath the kitchen court which proved to be the the contents of a medieval cess pit and we've taken as much as that we could our laboratories sampled 2 litres of it and they found evidence so far the 15 different kinds of meat and fish and 30 different kinds of fruit and vegetable so there's the 12th century dart in the castle once all the debris and everything else had been cleared away and the whole thing had been cleaned up and sorted out and the water had been drained when everything else then obviously that the the time came to to start looking at what had to be done to restore or replace or redesign all the burnt-out rooms obviously there was an opportunity here not just to put back what was in a sense the good part of it was a really interesting pass but also to improve the whole area problem was really to get people to agree what we should do with it were the main rooms the Duke of Edinburgh gathered all the interested parties such as English heritage the department of national heritage as it was then the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Fine Arts Commission and formed the restoration committee he then personally showed them around the fire damaged area and suggested the work be divided up into blocks those rooms which could be put back as they were while others offered opportunities for new ideas I came conclusion that George's Hall really the the main building ought to remain and but if anybody wanted to design a new ceiling to it they could the grand reception room they obviously still had the walls you really had to put the ceiling back the way it was before and the rest anything could have happened except the red drawing-room which was one of a series of white green and Red's that were all designed by watch at the same time I then asked the Prince of Wales to chair a design committee whose task was to select the architects for the different blocks Giles downs was chosen to work on the parts of the castle where new ideas and solutions were needed there was generation on generation of different architects different designers a lot of them are using gothic and they were each reinterpreting the same basis of Gothic architecture in their own completely unique and distinctive way which led us to the conclusion that what we should do is carry on that tradition and do our own reinterpretation of Gothic when we saw Charles Downes his ideas I must say they did stand out as being either remarkably imaginative and don't tell you that but I think jazz dance clearly has an incredible capacity for understanding the the sheer geometry of Gothic architecture and he had a particular ability I believe to make the Gothic contemporary the only area where there was a sort of I suppose a serious discussion and that was about the ceiling or roof of the of some George's Hall I mean I'm afraid to say that that I'm I've never been a great admirer of Wired ville and I thought that what was done during King George the first time to Windsor was in some parts the cause anyway disastrous what was done to San George's Hall I thought was awful it must have been one of the great large rooms in this country and the destruction of the very painted ceiling for instance I think was an act of unbelievable vandalism but anyway they could do things like that in those days it was nobody could to say hang on a minute it's listed and you come to this do can't do that so I I felt some George's all in particular was a really rather dreary space in in terms of what weren't Villa done to it I think while had been very much up against budgetary calm state constraints by the time he got to this hall to these roof was a lot plainer than that in the nature of that room merited that the point of that was that a lot of people wanted to build a hammer beam roof over some George's Hall because they didn't like the the the rather cheap roof the door ceiling that Wow had put in under the original roof the other thing was we didn't want the roof to appear above the level of the sort of battlements and purists who said no we've gotta have a proper hammer beam roof and we said well look it's going to take years to a lot years to design for quite a long time to design quite a long time to provide all the timber and in the meantime this place again to be open to the elements so the decision was taken with a certain amount of reluctance to put a modern roof as high as possible and then allow the design of a hammer beam ceiling in sense within it looking at the hole it wasn't the length that was a problem it was the proportions the shape if you actually look at the cross-section was exactly the same as a railway carriage and it gave you that feel it wasn't an English Kings medieval anything in that sense of proportions were all wrong it needed to be made to feel much taller the previous roof form out of reform had gone back on so we didn't have much extra height we had three feet what we could do however was to move down the springing points the cobblestones in the walls and that gave us enough to put in a whole series of step tarts trusses the wood came from oak Forest's as far afield as Herefordshire and east anglia so just up the road in Windsor Great Park so you have to select your own very carefully at the beginning has to be very straight grained it has to be carefully grown and you have to know as much as you can about the sources come from if you had a tree that was leaning against a slope it has an inbuilt tension which when you chop it down is going to try and release so you're going to get Timbers which will Bend more well in George's Hall the distance between walls at one end is about foot and a half different the other end so of the 14 trusses been made out of green oak each one is slightly different any of the roof Timbers that you see there today we're growing as trees about three years ago so when the oak is fresh it's workable you can create the lovely sort of mould and elements of that ceiling and then in about 20 years time when the oak is seasoned it'll become as hard as nails to hard in fact to drive a six in a limb to here we were trying to reuse the techniques of using green oak and we had to relearn the method of jointing those oak members so that when the timber dried out and shrank the joints actually get stronger it's a bit like those wooden Chinese puzzles that you take apart very much like that and you have to think very clearly and logically about the order and allow for each to have a housing in the next without weakening the a small army of 4,000 craftsmen then moved into the most exclusive building site on earth 78 miles of scaffolding and 12,000 and delivery vehicles supported over 200 specialist companies who gradually and painstakingly used the best mix of ancient methods and modern techniques to rebuild and refurnish an area of a hundred and ten thousand square feet of castle [Music] I think it's the best revenue because the old methods and modern technology see that's the way we working I mean I was when I built this place with only eight candles the first time I kind of the Windsor to work everything was new I was never seen anything like it before coming and coming down the drive into the place didn't know what was around the next corner who could see glimpse into the castle I'll remember first getting into the compound looked like pretty much any other building site and then when you come up the steps up to the top of the North Terrace it's this fantastic garden takes your breath away and everything's pretty awesome the contractors who work at Windsor have become accustomed to this rather unique sight they have come from all over Britain and many have actually lived near the castle in the Royal Mews some George's already its grandeur and I think and it's also provided the opportunity to put something at the east end of it so you chosen a huge reproduction of a design in some George's Chapel by tractors sort of round shape with a garter on but this is this thing is about eight foot across that'll be right at the end so that whole room I think will look tremendous well it does already actually the ceiling is once again adorned with the coats of arms of all the Knights of the Garter the oldest order of chivalry in the world whose patron saint isn't George my only quibble is with his good you almost gotta don't could not quite put a sort of sort of caste which made it look like plastic you say to me exhumed would that the treatment is maybe good you look at that you see what I mean while all this work was taking place at Windsor instant James's Palace London a team of restorers was using the opportunity to clean and repair the paintings that used to hang in the fire damaged areas [Music] what I made up is a mixture of chalk and gelatin which is an animal glue if there are losses in the paint going down to the canvas underneath and filling that so it's completely even with the surface so that when it comes to retouching we'll be filling just the area of putty [Music] the Crimson Dragon was part of a set designed by Wyatt Ville for Georgia thought it was where the Christmas tree always stood when we spent Christmas at Windsor and where the presents were exchanged the room was almost entirely destroyed by the fire but because the other rooms in the set did the white and the green survived that we thought it ought to be put back as it was one of the improvements that have been put in in the in the sixties in the crimson drawing-room had been the installation of a very large steel frame which tied together the sides of the bay window during the fire that steel beam but was heated up to such a degree that it expanded and pushed out the the bay window from the structure that he was sort of knitted into in effect it D bonded itself from the main curtain wall and it started to move outwards and from all accounts people could actually see it moving and then the next day they saw it moving back obviously it had been very badly affected by the fire in fact it was probably the area of external wall that most affected by the fire we ended up having to dismantle that war reuse as much of the surviving stone as we possibly could but rebuild it and this time we didn't put back the steel beam that had done the damage that in the first place [Music] well so far as the royal collection is concerned in the course of the restoration particularly of the staterooms all major decisions concerning the look of the Romans have been referred to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for their approval I think one of the most interesting examples of this would be the material in the crimson drawing-room on the silk on the walls and curtains because previously that was a large 19th century pattern on the walls which in fact Queen Mary had installed in the 1920s and the feeling that we had quite strongly was that a smaller scale pattern would be much more in keeping with the room and in fact we were lucky enough to find a small piece of the original silk that had been there in the Georgia fourth period so with the Queen's approval we were able to copy that and put that up in the place of the father over large pattern that had been there one of the more demanding areas of the restoration has been looking at the way the decoration of the silk of the curtains has been handled and really a very great deal of time attention given to to the most my new things which most people gained the room wouldn't even be conscious are there but it's the some of these small details that make a room work or not [Music] [Music] [Music] of all the treasures and works of art going back into the castle only three will be missing this painting of Frederick Prince of Wales and his family by George Knapton replaces the one lost in the state dining room have George the third by Sir William beachy it will hang above an exact copy of the august's pigeon sideboard which was also reduced to ashes both painting and sideboard were too big to get out the third loss was the father Willis organ built for Queen Victoria which was part of the private chapel the chapel was sometimes chapel and sometimes passageway who closed the doors and opened the curtains and then he became a chapel and who close the curtains and open the doors it became a passage so I had a look at the plans because I thought there might be some possibility with the restructuring it's said that there would be a dedicated a private chapel which wouldn't be a passage and it so happened that it it fitted in almost exactly with its with the window above the Aquarius door what sort of diagonal door in the corner of the quadrangle and it just fitted in such a way that you could make an octagon which was of the rest of what would be in the chapel which was on the central axis of some George's Hall so that really suggested to me there was a real opportunity there to make it a great improvement on the layout of that area what we needed was something in that space which would act as an antechamber to Sir Georges hall and would turn this grand processional route through 90 degrees and will also fit within the remains left after the fire an eight-pointed star an octagon actually fitted very well into the geometry of what was left after the fire and it's an excellent forum to turn a corner and you can naturally enter it on the angle and you feel quite right about going at the other side the only better one would be a circle I guess for the NA particular very well so he went for an octagon form it needed to be live wait we couldn't put a heavy stone structure there or anything like that so we looked at doing a structure in timber in fact none brother in timber with eight columns and we did a little diagram you could always imagined it being dropped into the hole left by the fire like something arriving from space when the helicopter was doing in the octagonal anteroom some of the forms he wanted to create in the shapes you see here this is not possible to do a natural oak I mean you'd have to chop down off the forests of Europe to actually find the the shapes in the natural oak that Giles wanted to create so there he again working with oak he went into a new technique that's called glue-laminated and what you do is you take a series of strips of oak and because of the the new glues that we have these days you can bend them into shape glue them and they will hold and so it was really fascinating to work with him and actually see the way that his mind began to and unravel these wonderful ideas and shapes and forms the geometry of the structure self the detail of it of an obvious historical inspiration would be the crossing at Ely which is a very fine example of medieval English carpentry we looked at the geometry of that and I looked at a way that I could develop a geometry for this particular octagon using very simple Gothic techniques if you like with a pair of compasses then with the whole restoration project scheduled to finish in November 1997 in time for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh 50th wedding anniversary disaster struck once again fire was the cause we got a phone call on a Monday morning a few weeks a few months ago to say they've been fire at the factory and six of those columns which was six of the eight columns we needed had been destroyed now potentially that could have completely derailed the project because by them we had committed ourselves to finishing by November 97 and everything was moving in that direction with this very careful planning but clearly if we didn't have our lantern lobby we'd lost if you like the jewel in the crown initially there's huge panic and and frantic energy but when we actually got out there and resequenced operations we go out there and talk to the particular craftsmen involved again use the winds of exercise is very special we have a very special occasion coming up in November and we got their support to build a new shared alongside the sheds being built down to salvage what they could and start working double shifts [Music] with just six months to go to the 50th wedding anniversary date the contractor had completed the work and was able with a certain amount of pride to deliver the key element of the new room the land [Music] they hadn't been injured or anything you want to put it in with the DS or so it's in and fixed well I'm gonna get it wrong no thanks trust me well I'm quite good to put it a little bit of glue in the bottom area literary trust just drops in the hole but does it have to do in the particular yes it does it faces the 90s the 1997 phases of George's for so it's got to go in a certain way it's actually got the stage of being almost finished as a Betsy thanks all the wonderful but I was rather hoping that at certain times the day really then it might have become in and when you've given these shafts of light sometimes neither could send money's mamas but it couldn't it couldn't be anything other I think them than contemporary could've and it's not really just a reproduction it's not what they love to call a pest eesh and it's unbelievably complicated I mean the geometry to get you know the balustrade right this modern gothic ceiling is part of the transformation of a space created alongside the lantern lobby into a permanent private chapel [Music] there are three windows in one window but in three sections at the southwest end of the chapel which we thought might be an idea to put a stained-glass window in there that somehow is a memorial to the fire and what happened after it so we got some designs but in the end we suggested that it might show the aftermath of the fire at the bottom and then farman coming in or the hose through one window and a salvage man coming in and that gave the opportunity to salvage something so he's carrying out a picture and what [Music] there is a completely new wooden spiral staircase leading to a balcony in the chapel which the choir will use is it safe to go [Music] because it fits into such a curious place there was an odd corner left as a vestry and there's an odd corner left where you can put an organ and there's another little platform place or in one corner where you can have choir sit but I mean it it's a very odd the chapel itself is alright but these other bits are just odd spaces that got left by fitting it into this extraordinary juncture between the east side and the north side I do believe it's obviously of enormous importance to to restore it that I think we owe it to the future nothing else this has been one of the great things about the restoration I think is the the sheer magnitude of the of the skills that still exist in this country and they are wonderful people and now we have a testament to their skills and their love and dedication and they're the ones who deserve all the credit not not people like me intercept we're gonna committed for a short term if you couldn't get off on having been part of this then you know satis all right I think it'll last yes was he you had to be done it was time now it was burned down and people found to put it back and that's where it's all after all he belongs to all of us you know we set ourselves initially a target of doing it for within 40 million and we said we'd hoped to get it done finished it by the spring of 1998 and I hope we'll be well within 40 million 37 million perhaps somewhere in that area but well below the budget and we hope to have it all finished and ready at the time of the Queen's golden wedding anniversary this 20th November so head of schedule too five years to the day after the fire ravaged the castle Her Majesty the Queen unveiled a plaque to commemorate its rebuilding Windsor Castle was restored thank you all for coming hi there you can enjoy seeing when service told it is amazing what has been achieved in five years to all four thousand or seven people who have worked various times on this project I can't begin to describe how much means to us winter back and looking better than ever before in time for the celebrations to next week more especially it is perhaps best anniversary present we ever wished [Applause] an extraordinary knife and you get so close to a project like this when you're working on it for three or four years that you really find you don't trust your own feelings about it so although I've been thinking well it's okay you know it's alright it's great to hear other people say so my part obviously was only very small and the old fire brigade acted as a big team if you like but it's nice to see the whole royal family here now especially the travels I bet they've really done us proud well I said to Commonwealth Heads of Government that the Queen infants village 50th wedding anniversary was come was coming would they be willing to contribute to a gift and I must tell you that this is the only common world venture that has been hugely oversubscribed every one of them said of course and as you know this is the one here and there are two paintings that have also given their all the heads of government I said yes yes yes I have to be in here myself of my they look good as it was being done but to go away for a little while come back and Seraphin expose pictures on the wall really good it's amazing job once-in-a-lifetime job I'm really proud to be have been part of it to go down in history as the contemporary part of the castle [Music] I feel very proud very proud to be part of a heritage that will probably go on for hundreds and hundreds of years it wasn't a lifetime [Music] occasion achievement what it what you want but couldn't dreamed of it really it's been challenging the pressure has been the end of the day you can see for the same finish results for yourself [Music] well I think to see it as it is now it's a credit really to everyone that's worked here since we left because unfortunately when I did leave it wasn't quite a bit of a mess [Music] well I have a real affection for them for the place and it would have been awful not to have I've restored it as lovingly as possible now I think that with the restoration more and more people will be able to see what has been done here and I hope they'll feel that it's all been worthwhile [Music]

Channel: Documentary Base

Views: 469,788

Rating: 4.8768263 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, Documentaries. History, Windsor, Castle, Windsor Castle, Prince Charles, Queen, British, Monarcy, Duke, Duke Of Edinburgh, Duke Of York, Prince, Andrew, Charles, Phillip, Edward, Windsor Fire, Windsor Castle Restored, Full Documentary, TV Documentary, full documentary, documentaries, full length documentaries

Id: VQQOCdXZkA8

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019