Maritime Greenwich, or How To Declare Yourself the Center of the Universe

(This is the last of my belated posts about our February travels...)

You know me, I like my World Heritage sites. Westminster is on the List, as is the Tower of London. But those are so obvious. My London World Heritage adventure of choice? Maritime Greenwich.

Maritime Greenwich is easily accessible by public transit, about 30 minutes south of central London. But when we emerged from the Cutty Sark station into grey misty wetness, we realized we hadn't a clue as to what we had actually come to see.

Greenwich on the Thames: I know there was a palace here, related somehow to Elizabeth I; and there's Greenwich Mean Time, which might or might not be the same thing as the Prime Meridian; and there's an "old royal naval college", but I don't know why it was important, other than that it sounds slightly familiar. Like my vague sense of literary deja-vu in the rest of London, I had the disconcerting feeling that I knew all about Greenwich without knowing anything: my history and science, all muddled up.

The weather didn't help: a fine drizzle that blurred the edges of the landscape and made it hard to discern buildings that were closer than they seemed. We followed signs to the campus of the Old Royal Naval College and its "interpretive center" (built to justify Maritime Greenwich's inscription on the World Heritage List), which helped unpack the layers of history. The Greenwich I had read about as a child - the palace of the Tudors, where Henry VIII lived and Elizabeth I was born - had fallen into disrepair during the Civil War and was torn down after the Restoration; "modern" Greenwich is a baroque complex, designed in parts by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren during the 1600s.

The palatial buildings along the river are distinct from the Royal Observatory up on the overlooking hill, which was what we had really come to see. So we fumbled our way through the wet parkland to the seventeenth-century red brick observatory, rounded and ornate. With the low-hanging clouds of misting rain, we could barely make out from the scenic overlook the nearby sites in Greenwich (like the Millennium Dome), much less those of London in the distance.

Disclaimer: Not my feet.

It turns out that the observatory is a popular tourist destination, and the site was crowded despite the weather. I am still uncertain what it meant to stand astride the Prime Meridian that passes through the observatory's courtyard (to straddle the eastern and western hemispheres at the same time?), but we did piece together from the exhibits the connection between astronomy, longitude, and the keeping of time:

Once upon a time, before the advent of GPS, ship captains could not measure where they were, horizontally-speaking, on the globe. Latitude - the distance from the equator - was a simple matter of geometry (the angle of the sun from the horizon at noon). But longitude required a reference point back home - either time or, less reliably, the relative position of stars.

So the royal astronomers stayed up every night at the Greenwich observatory diligently mapping the stars as seen from London. But time was a more difficult matter: Sony didn't make digital watches back in the 1700s - and a clock that measures time using a pendulum doesn't exactly work on a ship at sea. Even after Parliament announced a ridiculously large prize for developing an effective time keeper for sea-faring ships, it still took 80 years - 80 years - to develop the spring-loaded clock. This clock would be set to the time back home - a standardized time - and thereby allow sailors to measure their horizontal distance from home (their longitude) by comparing the standardized time with the local time (as measured by the sun).

It being the height of the British Empire, the Brits set the standardized time (Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT) and longitude 0 (the Prime Meridian) to Greenwich. If you can, do.

As for the naval college (originally a naval hospital), I still don't understand its historical importance, but I was soothed by its serene, symmetric geometry and its long lines of perspective from the river up to the surrounding green English hillsides. These are the sort of massive uniform buildings of greyed stone that look elegantly simple from afar but overwhelm and dwarf you when you stand alongside them. Some of the more ornate halls are open to the public, but its real benefit to the visitor is the beauty of its campus spread out alongside the river.