Greenwich Observatory

We’ve been living in the shadow (almost) of the famous old observatory for two years, and only now, the day before we have to move away, do I get around to adding to the description I gave just after we arrived.

Hastily I levitate to a few hundred feet and make you a picture of the ‘s whole complex.

It is the centerpiece of a long rectangular park that stretches south from the Thames.  Across the middle is a surprisingly steep scarp, dividing the river plain from a plateau.  The building at the top of this picture is the oldest part of the observatory, called Flamsteed House.  It perches on the edge of the scarp, looking down over the lower park and an area of palatial buildings adjoining the river.

South of Flamsteed House is a bar of buildings containing the Meridian Observatory.  South again is a platform on which stands the Altazimuth Pavilion, and out of which pokes the truncated cone of the Peter Harrison Planetarium, pointing at the Pole Star.  Then there is a drop to the Sout Building, with four multi-storey arms and a tower.  How many domes can you count?

A road comes slanting up a valley from the main park gate, and passes the foot of the observatory’s gardens.  It joins (at a roundabout out of the picture) a straight avenue that comes from the gate at the park’s other end and is the main access for cars, coaches, fil crews, and horse riders.  But most visitors walk up a steep path that you can glimpse through the trees beyond the observatory.

Either way brings you to a stone parapet where the avenue ends.  This is the Greenwich viewpoint.  It is dominated by a mighty statue of General James Wolfe, the conqueror of Quebec, and it looks down over the lower meadow, the palatial buildings, the Thames (seen in a few glimpses), the peninsula that us called the Isle of Dogs, and the commercial skyscrapers of Canary Wharf.  I don’t think I previously showed you my version of this view, another laborious picture.

The observatory is now a museum, which is well worth paying to enter; or you get in free if you are a member of the five Greenwich Museums: this, the Queen’s House and the National Maritime Museum, both in the palatial area, and the ship “Cutty Sark,” which is Greenwich’s most spectacular sight.  Not part of this system is the little Fan Museum, in the street alongside the park.

The public entrance is in the front of the Meridian Observatory, but you find yourself sent out the back of it along a path into the back of Flamsteed House, and you go up and down its levels, marveling that it seems so much larger inside than out.  There is more information than you can absorb about longitude and clocks and meridian circles and Flamsteed and his successors as Astronomer Royal.  More still as you wend back into the Meridian Observatory, and, if you have time, down to the southern half.  It’s worth taking a guided tour with one of the deeply knowledgeable members of Greenwich’s astronomy club, the Flamsteed Society, because you will get some of what journalists call “color bites” about the sometimes cantankerous figures out of the past.  I have time now – because I don’t have long before the movers come for my computer – to tell you only one, about the Great Equatorial Telescope.  You can climb many steel steps to gaze up at this monster, a 28-inch-aperture refractor.

When the Queen was invited to look through its eyepiece at the satellites of Jupiter, she did so and murmured politely “Very interesting…”  The Duke of Edinburgh then took his turn, and expostulated: “Can’t see a bloody thing!”  Someone had forgotten to remove the lens cap.

I’m still a member of the Flamsteed Society and of the Greenwich Museums, and I expect to return to the subject or to Greenwich itself.