LONDON - The Royal Academy opened for business as usual yesterday only hours after a fire which threatened to destroy paintings worth millions of pounds, including works by Reynolds, Constable and Turner.
As firefighters finished mopping up inside the 18th century building in London's Piccadilly after the blaze it emerged the damage was less than initially feared.
The secretary of the Royal Academy, Mr David Gordon, said: "The damage this morning looks much less serious than it seemed last night. A fire is always a serious matter, but we were able to deal with the fire very quickly in the way we had predicted, and the fact that this morning people are coming in to see our George Grosz exhibition shows that our procedures are working."
At one stage staff and firefighters formed a human chain to remove paintings from areas where they were in danger from the water used to put out the blaze. Up to 100 people, who had been attending a lecture, were evacuated.