Greenwich

Enjoying the weather in front of the Maritime University

Another beautiful day in London, meant that we headed out to Greenwich.  This is a really nice part of London, definitely worth a visit if you are here.  Especially if the weather is nice, just don't expect the place to yourself.  The market between the train station and the park was absolutely heaving with people, but we managed to score ourselves some paella (strangely popular here) and headed to the greenery.

View from the observatory, back across the Olympics dressage stadium being set up

View across to canary wharf

The main exhibit on at the time was on the pomp and ceremony surrounding the Thames throughout the centuries.  Pretty topical, given the Jubilee we've just had, where the Queen floated down the river in her barge surrounding by hundreds of other boats.  The Thames used to be a pretty big life force of the town, perhaps less so now, what with the docks all being converted into flash offices.  I very naughtily took photos in this exhibit, though in my defence it was because the ticket collector was standing right in front of the big sign which said not to take photos.  Luckily I never use flash for my photos, but no wonder I was getting a few funny looks.  But it does mean I can show people, for once, some of what is going on inside these exhibits.

Ostrich chowing down

The Lord Mayors show used to be a much more flamboyant affair, with all the guilds sending a barge down the river, nowadays the barges seem to be reserved for Jubilees and that's about it.  One of the guilds was the ironmongers guild, and their mascot was an ostrich with a horseshoe in it's mouth, as it was thought at the time that ostriches could eat iron.

Another thing I learned was that the Queen actually owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water.  What they mean by unmarked is whether or not the beaks have notches in them.  But it's not as if you are allowed to just go around notching up swan's beaks, only members of two guilds are allowed to notch up swans for themselves, the dyers and vintners.  Not sure how those random guilds got that particular privilege.  You will be happy to hear that the beaks are no longer notched, instead rings are used.  Much more humane, especially as some of the old markings looked incredibly complex for the poor birds.

An unmarked swan

Queen Victoria's sailor boy outfit

There was also a little sailors outfit, it was actually the outfit that Queen Victoria dressed her eldest son in.  And it is this outfit which apparently spawned the craze of dressing children in sailor outfits.

One of the royal barges

We also went to the Royal Observatory, which is up the hill. There was a house there set up as it was for the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, in 1675.  Apparently he didn't get paid much by the king and so was forced to take on students, which he resented as it took time away from his research.  It's good to see that the plight of the researcher really hasn't changed much in 300 years.

There was also an exhibit on the Longitudinal problem, when sailors started to make longer and longer journeys they could tell their latitude fairly easily, the distance from the equator, but they had no way of working out their longitude, the distance east or west from where they had started. 

Queen Mary and King William Courts

Painted roof inside King William Court, with a choir rehearsing and all

An Olympic class sailing boat, weighing 127kg

In 1714 the British Parliament enacted the Longitude prize for anyone who was able to measure the longitude to an accurate degree.  The money on offer was quite large, up to 20,000 pounds for first prize.  Of course the academics at the observatory wanted to prove their stuff, so they decided to start making detailed measurements of the moon and stars, thinking that if people knew where certain stars were, and had incredibly detailed knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, they would be able to work out their longitude.  It took a self-educated carpenter to solve the problem first, he built a clock which would work on a ship.  The idea being that for every hour time difference between your home port and where you were now you had travelled about 15 degrees longitude.

The idea of the academics was that the moon moves quite quickly through the sky, in an hour it will move about half a degree, which is about it's diameter.  This means that if sailors could measure the moon's location with respect to other stars, correct for errors and compare this with a lunar table they could work out their longitude that way as well.

Dave outside the Cutty Sark

At the Observatory they also have a meridian line set up, and everyone has to queue if they want to get their photo taken with it.  Pretty weird, since it is a completely arbitrary line, and if you walk outside the observatory you are still able to cross from one side to the other.