This afternoon, we will check out of the hotel and hop on a train to Heathrow airport. I booked a room at the Sofitel at Terminal 5 for tonight so we could have a comfy last night in London, and an easy walk to our gate in the morning.
Our train leaves Greenwich at about 1pm, so we plan to spend this morning seeing a few more sights. The Painted Hall is supposed to be beautiful. It is the former dining hall of the 18th-century sailors’ hospital that the Old Royal Naval College occupies. Its ceilings and walls were painted in the 1700s with stunning scenes celebrating British history. People have compared it to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This we have to see.
After paying about $50 entrance fee for both of us, it was a bit underwhelming. There was a large art installation of sorts inside that had just opened there that day.
What visitors to the Painted Hall expect to see (this is a photo of the brochure):
Nice, isn’t it? This is what we saw:
The giant lamps are nice, but I’d really rather see the ceiling. 🙂 Oh well.
That wraps up our visit to Greenwich. We’re walking to the train station, so of course it’s raining again. We transferred to the Elizabeth Line to LHR and experienced an ominous 20-minute delay about halfway there when the overhead electric lines stopped working. But we kept the faith and eventually made it to our comfy hotel room at the airport. We celebrated Halloween with Shepherd’s pie and a bottle of wine.
Our flight home tomorrow is a 10-hour direct flight to Austin. Nice and easy.
Almost home.
What a great trip.
Links for the curious:
The Painted Hall website to plan your visit. They have a well-done 3D virtual tour that’s worth a look, whether or not you’ve already visited in person.
Where to stay? If you want to stay at the airport, and specifically Terminal 5, Sofitel is your best bet. The Elizabeth Line from London runs to each terminal at LHR. It’s an elevator ride and an easy walk from the railway station to the hotel reception desk.
Up on the hill, behind the Queen’s house, is a large green space called Greenwich Park. I could have spent hours just walking around this park. It’s lovely. At the top of the hill sits the Royal Observatory, commissioned by King Charles II in 1675. This morning, we headed up the hill to see it.
Ok, first, some historical context. You’re a sailor in the late 1600s. Your ship navigates close to shore by piloting using well-documented coastal landmarks, bearings, and charts. When out of sight of land, your ship navigates using dead reckoning, which uses your last known position and your speed and heading to estimate your current position, but that is fraught with potential for error. Better, you can calculate your latitude (your north/south location on the globe) by measuring the angle of the sun at solar noon at your location using a quadrant and declination tables. But accurately determining your east/west position at sea, your longitude, was not yet an easy thing to do. On dry land, one could measure the transit of moons across the face of Jupiter and use celestial tables to calculate longitude. But it’s not easy to do on a boat moving on the sea.
The Royal Observatory was established in 1675 with the express charter to “find out the so much desired Longitude of Places for perfecting the art of navigation.” Work began at the Flamsteed House, by the first Astronomer Royal and his successors, to accurately map the celestial bodies. This culminated in the publication of the first Nautical Almanac in 1767. This aided in estimating longitude based on celestial observations, but still difficult to do at sea.
A second, more desirable method to determine longitude would be based on timekeeping. The Earth is divided into 360 degrees of longitude. The Earth turns 360 degrees in a 24-hour day. 360 degrees / 24 hours = 15 degrees of longitude per elapsed hour. The British Navy arbitrarily established Greenwich as its 0 degrees longitude, for the purposes of maritime navigation and charting. If you know the time at Greenwich when you observe local solar noon where you are, you can calculate your longitude. For example, if it is solar noon where you are (12:00pm), and you know that it is also 2:00pm in Greenwich, you can calculate your longitude as 2 hours x 15 degrees per hour, or 30 degrees earlier than (or west of) Greenwich. In the 17th century, though, to know the time in Greenwich required a timepiece that you set to Greenwich time when you left England, and which kept time accurately while at sea months later. In 1675, such a clock did not exist. That was the longitude problem.
In 1714, the British Parliament introduced the Parliament Act, which put up a prize of 20,000 pounds (about $2M today) to whoever could create a timepiece that met specific criteria of accuracy at sea.
In 1730, a woodworker named John Harrison attempted to build a timepiece to meet the criteria of the challenge. It took him 5 years and required learning the principles of metallurgy, but he did it. His first prototype was called “H1.”
Harrison’s H1 prototype timepiece – 1735.
Time trials proved it worked. However, he was paid only 500 pounds of the 20,000-pound prize. Harrison thought he could improve upon it, so he created three more prototypes over the next 25 years.
After H3, he changed his design altogether, from a clock to a watch. The result was H4.
Harrison’s prototype H4 – 1759.
Time trials on the H4 proved its accuracy, and work began on making additional copies, to prove how replicable the design was. Only after entreaties to the king was John Harrison eventually paid the full 20,000-pound prize, when he was in his eighties.
It’s all history now, but the next time you pull out a GPS to find your lat/long position on your boat, think about the work of John Harrison.
So, let’s discuss time a little bit more. By the 1800s, Britain’s nautical charts, which all used Greenwich as the 0 degree meridian, were becoming the global norm, though there were numerous other meridians used by other countries. In 1884, there was a global conference to declare what would become the Prime Meridian going forward. At the end, Greenwich’s meridian was declared as the Prime Meridian, to be used not only for navigation, but to establish a global basis (Greenwich Mean Time) for the 24 global time zones going forward. The location of the Prime Meridian is marked at the Royal Observatory by a metal line that intersects the observatory where the equatorial telescope sat that was used to create all the celestial tables, and proceeds out through the courtyard, and across the globe.
The Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory. The metal strip proceeds northward through the courtyard.
Greenwich Mean Time impacted everyday life beyond navigation at sea. After the Meridian Conference of 1884, the Prime Meridian at Greenwich was used as a global zero degrees longitude for navigation. Prior to that, individual towns maintained their own local times based on local solar noon, with some amount of error, obviously. But the trains must run on time! By 1847, the expanding railways had adopted GMT as their standard for timekeeping as well. By 1855, most public clocks were using GMT as well. To facilitate this, the Royal Observatory established a clock that kept official GMT time, and which emitted electrical impulses that went out on wires, to sync clocks across the country.
The Shepherd Gate Clock was the first public clock, on the wall of the Royal Observatory that marked Greenwich Mean Time.
A red Time Ball was added to the top of the Royal Observatory that would raise to the top of a mast at 12:55pm each day, and fall at 1:00 pm GMT. It was observed by ships in the Thames below to synchronize their timepieces on board before setting out to sea – so they could reliably calculate their longitude on their journey.
The Flamsteed House at the Royal National Observatory, with the Prime Meridian extending through the courtyard in the foreground.
Pretty damn cool.
I have often thought out loud that I have lived during one of the most exciting times – with the evolution of technology, computing, and the internet, and whatever else is happening these days. But as I think about the history I’ve absorbed over the last week, there has been no shortage of innovation across the centuries brought to life by meticulous and hard-working people that just wanted to solve the problem at hand.
By the end of a full day, the clouds were gathering again with rain, so we headed back down the hill to our hotel.
The Royal Observatory, viewed from the Queen’s House.
About 10 years ago I read a book by Dava Sobel, called “Longitude.” It tells the story of John Harrison and his quest to solve the longitude problem. Check it out if you’re interested in more information. I enjoy her books, which I would classify as scientific non-fiction (?). She delves into historical figures and science topics. “Galileo’s Daughter” was the first of her books that I read, and I try to read the rest of them as I find them.
We went to Portsmouth to see the Ships. We went to Salisbury to see the Stones. Now we are headed to Greenwich to see the Clocks. We took the train from Salisbury to London Waterloo Railway Station on the first rainy day of our trip. There are multiple ways to travel from Waterloo, in Central London, to Greenwich, in Southeast London. We are taking the easiest route by catching a ride on the Uber Boat run by Thames Clippers. It is a foot ferry that runs up and down the Thames. The closest ferry stop is right underneath the London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel along the river. The very short walk from the train station to the Eye took us right by the IBM London office building. It must be a new location; I remember it being in a slightly different location on my last business trip there, about a kilometer to the east.
The London Eye at Waterloo.
The ferry was comfy. And we could grab a beverage and snack on board, and just enjoy the sights on the 45 minute trip over to Greenwich without getting wet on this rainy day.
Big Ben and Westminster on the north shore of the Thames.The ferry took us under about 10 bridges, including Tower Bridge.
The Cutty Sark is a beautifully restored clipper ship built in 1869 for the China tea trade; the last of its kind. It sits at Greenwich Pier, where we got off the ferry.
The Cutty Sark once was the fastest ship of its time ~max speed 17.5 knots
When fully rigged, the ship flew over 30,000 square feet of sail, with over 11 miles of running rigging.
The inside of ship was a tad unremarkable, with empty wide open space, as it was basically made to hold as much cargo as possible; densely stacked chests of tea, and later wool. A typical crew size was 20-25 men.
The copper/zinc-clad keel of the Cutty Sark from below. The ship is suspended in space to see the topsides, the insides, and the bottom, 280′ long, 36′ wide, 21′ of draft.
We toured the National Maritime Museum on the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College. It is the largest maritime museum in the world, and admission is free! Its exhibits pretty comprehensively cover British seafaring over the years, and across the globe.
National Maritime Museum
Greenwich has long been a center of Royal activity. Greenwich Palace is no more, but it was the birthplace of Henry VIII in 1491 and his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, who became queens. It was the Tudor base during his lifetime. Since that time, the Queen’s House was built here in 1619. It is now a museum and art gallery. Admission to the Queen’s House is also free, amazingly.
Probably the most famous painting in the Queen’s House is their Armada portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, but I didn’t take a photo. Here’s a link. It’s beautiful. It commemorates the failed invasion of Britain by the Spanish Armada.
The current grand buildings along the Thames were built in 1694 as a hospital for injured and aging seamen. The buildings’ layout was designed to not block the view from the Queen’s House to the Thames.
The view from Water Gate on the Thames looking south past the twin towers of the Old Royal Naval College to the Queen’s House
The seaman’s hospital closed in 1869, after which the site became the home of the Royal Naval College up until 1997. Now it is a cultural and historic site and foundation called the Old Royal Naval College, and it is the the heart of Maritime Greenwich.
We stayed at the Admiral Hardy, two blocks from the Greenwich pier, next to the Greenwich Market, and a short walk to all things in historic Greenwich.
The Admiral Hardy and the entrance to Greenwich Market on the right.
The Admiral Hardy is a large public house that dates back to the late 1800s. They have 7 very nice rooms upstairs. Hotel guests “check in” at the bar. 🙂 Our room was very nice and large. No elevator, though, FYI. The hotel is adjacent to the Greenwich Market, full of food and retail vendors. The sign on the outside of the market’s current location says 1831. Inside it says “Est. 1737.” Either way, it’s been around a while.
At the end of our first day in Greenwich, we were a little damp and a little tired. On day two in Greenwich, we will see the Clocks!
Links for the curious:
Uber Boat’s Thames Clipper website, for an easy way to get from place to place in London via the Thames. Or you can just stay on and do a loop.
Sheila365 