Day 81: Greenwich

London, as one of the world's pre-eminent cities, obviously has several UNESCO World Heritage sites ready and waiting for us! Four, in fact - the Tower of London, Westminster Palace & Abbey, Kew Gardens, and the Maritime buildings at Greenwich. It was the latter where we decided to head today, for the first stop on our tour.

Headed out fairly early with Schnitzel, a couple of stops on the tube and then the DLR - a modern above-ground light rail system that runs out into east London. We arrived around 10:30am and set to exploring.

There are several buildings here that make up the world heritage site - two large buildings of the former Naval College designed by the famous government architect Sir Christopher Wren (of St Paul's Cathedral fame), Queen's House which is a classical-style Palladium house built in the 17th century for Queen Anne, and the old Royal Observatory from which originates both the Greenwich Meridian (0' 0" 0.00s longitude), and Greenwich Mean Time.

We started with the large Naval College buildings, which were very impressive from the outside but not much to be seen inside these days. One building has a super-impressive painted ceiling, a sort of English Sistine Chapel, but it's undergoing restoration and was basically not visible.

Queen's House was quite nice as well, though it wasn't open either so we took a few photos and moved on. This area was on a bend in the Thames and in a large area of parklands, so we let Schnitzel run around off-leash for a while which he really enjoyed! Even managed to find himself another dachshund to play with.

Last stop was the Observatory, up on a hill behind the complex, so we wandered up and had a look around. I went in while Shandos explored more of the parklands with Schnitzel, since she had been through on one of her previous visits to London.

I really enjoyed the museum, as it was really well put together and clearly outlined why discoveries made here were so important. In the age of sail, latitude (distance north/south of the equator) was fairly easy for sailors to calculate, based on the positions of a couple of stars. But longitude was a much more difficult problem to solve. Eventually it ended up being a combination of moon positions vs stars, and comparing local time against Greenwich Mean Time, but for the latter to work properly also required major advances in timekeeping (ie portable clocks that wouldn't drift more than a few seconds each year, despite salt water, salty air, ships rocking etc). Eventually the problems were solved and shipwrecks became far less common!

By now it was pushing 2pm and well past lunchtime. Being a Sunday, there was only really one possible option - a traditional Sunday pub roast. We headed to the Trafalgar Tavern on the Thames riverfront, back near the light rail stop, where we grabbed a nice warm table inside. I had roast pork, while Shandos had lamb, and of course we both had all the trimmings (potato, carrots, broccoli, asparagus, gravy and Yorkshire puddings). I had to sample their in-house beer as well!

For something a little different we decided to take the underground passage underneath the Thames on the way back. The next station was just near the far end, so we didn't have to venture far out of our way!

Back home around 4pm after a brief look around Angel, as Manchester United were playing Arsenal and I wanted to watch the game. But no such luck - none of the nearby pubs were showing the game, even the Ladbrokes betting house only had text updates! So back to the apartment, where I watched the game via an illicit stream. Crazy.

Since we'd had an expensive lunch, we stayed in tonight for dinner and had more spaghetti with pesto. Did a bit of work on video and writing, and fell asleep listening to a podcast. Looking like a busy few more days!Read more