An exhibition that marks the 40th anniversary of the 1984 York Minster fire opens this weekend.
The exhibition will journey through the dramatic events of 9 July 1984, when the roof of the South Transept was struck by lightning.
Out of the Ashes will open on Saturday 29 June at York Minster and run until June 2025.
It will feature powerful eyewitness accounts and archive photographs showcasing the heroic rescue efforts, clean-up operation and four years of restoration works that returned the cathedral to its former glory.
The process of putting together the exhibition was “really emotional,” Kirsty Mitchell, curator at York Minster, told YorkMix.
“We’re quite used in the collections team to working with things that are hundreds of years old, and suddenly looking through the archive and accounts of something that’s really relatively quite recent and still in collective memory for the Minster and in York was really powerful.
“The best thing has been really seeing the community spirit coming through. Volunteers came from all over to help with the clean up, there’s a really lovely sense of doing it together.
“We really hope we’ve done justice to everybody that was involved in stopping and fighting the fire, and also the restoration efforts afterwards.”
John David, master mason emeritus at York Minster, has worked at the cathedral for over forty years, and remembers the night of the fire.
“It doesn’t seem that long ago – what reminded me most recently was a few years ago, I went to Notre Dame just after the fire and the smell just brought me back to what the smell was like in here.”
John was woken around 2am to the news that the transept was on fire, and immediately sprung into action to help move any valuables they could out of the building. “We were worried the whole building might go up – we were moving furniture from altars, carpets, altar fabrics, anything that could move.”
After the fire had been safely doused, “the initial thing was clearing everything up – the smoke damage inside was huge. Over the next year we had to clean and dust everything down, we had huge scaffolding; it was an ongoing intense repair programme.
“There were so many people involved with the whole thing, we’re just one little bit – the people who came before us and are coming after us are just as important.”
The original drawings for six roof bosses designed by Blue Peter competition winners will also be on display – and one of them has been turned into a special fundraising pin badge. Titled ‘The Rose Window Survives the Flames’, it was designed by Laura Smith at aged ten.
The pin badges, costing £5, are available to buy either in the Minster shop or online – with all the money going back to supporting the Minster.
Entry to the exhibition is included with a standard admission ticket at no extra cost and is part of a series of activities and events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the blaze.
To find out more, visit the York Minster website.