Royal Observatory Greenwich - London

If you’ve stood on the Equator and jumped back and forth the next thing is to stand on zero degree’s longitude and do the same and if you go to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich they’ve got the official line on the courtyard floor inside the gates.

The Royal Observatory is at the top of the hill in Greenwich Park and its location gives some of the best views over the east part of London. The Observatory opened in 1675 and was the first purpose built scientific building in Britain.

Today its a museum with a big collection of astronomical and navigational tools, telescopes and clocks covering about the last 400 years and they also have some excellant display’s showing how to navigate using stars, how to work out your longitude and latitude using some of this old equipment.

They’re undergoing a £15million redevelopment at the moment so there’s scaffolding around some of the Observatory buildings and a few parts might be closed. The main Royal Observatory building is ahead of you when you reach the top of the hill and the Meridian Line is just through the gate on the right. Its free to enter but they do make you go and get a free ticket from the ticket window of the main building, not sure why they do this but there are boxes asking for donations to help pay for the renovations scattered about.

Once who’ve had your picture taken on the GMT line walk across into the brick building with the black door, Flamsteed House, named after John Flamsteed the first English Astronomer Royal. The house contains recreations of how Flamsteed lived in the house, the working conditions and the types of basic equipment they had to use at the time, the exhibition covers all floors of the building.

There are also some of the clocks John Harrison made back in the 18th century to try to gives ships an accurate ‘home time’ so they could work out their longitude. There’s a great little book by American Dava Sobel called Longitude, that came out about ten years ago telling the story of how they tried to solve the problem.

If you follow the story through Flamsteed House it brings you out of a side entrance and its a short walk over to the main building where they have displays of giant old sextants and telescopes.

There was actually a movie being filmed in the park today and all the film production trucks and catering area were right next to the Observatory so it was fairly busy around there. I saw them bringing back a car on a low trailer that had the cameras attached to the doors and in front.
Didn’t recognise who was in the car but there was a guy standing around the edges chatting to someone and he looked a dead ringer for Peter Jackson, the New Zealand guy who did Lord of the Rings. It didn’t look like a Hollywood scale picture so unless he’s having to go down market since King King I’d have to think it probably wasn’t him. Either way it was a nice autumnal day for filming.

The Royal Observatory is open seven days a week from 10am-5pm, its closed 24-26 December. The easiest way to get there is the Docklands Light Railway to Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich station or take a river boat to Greenwich then just follow the signs from either it’s about a five minute walk to the park and a five or ten minute one to the top of the hill. Make sure you bring a camera because there are great photo ops with Canary Wharf and the Dome in the background.