Posted 20 July 1993
Dear Folks
Woke up on Saturday and decided to visit “Historic Greenwich,” just the other side of the river from the old Docklands area of London. I haven’t been visiting London at all since I’ve been here, and I suppose it’s high time I got up there to see what’s what. From now on, I’ll try to spend at least one weekend day per week in London, looking around.
There are a number of attractions in Greenwich, principal among these being the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory. I figured of all the countries in the world, England must have the best maritime museum (I’ve only actually been to one other, and that was in San Francisco; a real disappointment).
Getting to Greenwich was a bit complicated. According to my AtoZ guide (that’s “Ay-to-Zed”), I was to take the train to Waterloo Station, then the Norther Tube line to the Embankment, then catch the District line to Tower Hill, then pick up the new Docklands Light Railway to Island Gardens in Docklands. From there I was to walk under the River Thames in a foot tunnel to Greenwich (getting back, I discovered it was simpler to use the trains and stay out of London altogether).
I know it’s a little weird going into a lot of detail about how I get to a place, but it is in the course Of Such journeys that real adventures happen. Getting to Greenwich is what much or most of this letter will be about. To get anywhere in London from Surbiton means a train ride, at least two or three different Tube rides, a lot of walking, and of course faffing about at several stations along the way. So there are many opportunities for discovery and adventure before you even get to where you are going.
For example, when I got to Tower Hill station, I discovered you had to leave the station and walk a block to get to the Docklands Light Rail station. When I went upstairs, I could see the station was across the street from the Tower of London, and boy was that an impressive sight, Before, I had only ever seen the Tower from a distance, or from a bus moving quickly by it, so I never appreciated how imposing it really is. The central keep was built by William the Conqueror, which makes it at least 900 years old. The surrounding walls and battlements are somewhat more recent, and they are huge. You don’t really feel it unless you are close by it.
There is supposed to be a museum or something in the Tower; it’s where the Crown Jewels are kept. I’ve never been there and am not much interested in going because it is supposed to be the most visited attraction in London, and the queues are alleged to be pretty horrible. Maybe I’ll go in there when someone from the States comes for a visit.
Anyway, YOU can imagine this part of the city was a bit of a zoo, with big groups of tourists moving around and tour buses constantly prowling about. Right next to the Tube station, however, little-noticed by most of the people, was a 30-foot section of ancient Roman wall. The sign in front of the wall said “Ancient Roman Wall,” which was rather frustrating. I wanted to know when it was built. There was a copy of a Roman memorial inscription nearby which gave a bit of history, commemorating a Roman governor who successfully ruled the locals with moderation. No mean feat, since the local Britons (a tribe called the Inicii or something) were said to be pretty savage, and actually did manage to overrun and sack Roman Londiniurn (as it was called) at one time.
There is a pretty good sort of cartoon map of historical London in my plastic map box. It notes all the sites of historical interest with little symbols representing from which period in history the places date. There are a number of little symbols for Roman ruins around the City (the square-mile center of London, which is bound by the lines of the old Roman walls, and for which the Tower is the southeast anchor). In a city which has grown and changed so much in the last 1,000 years, it is amazing there is anything left of the Romans at all.
I had to wander round a corner to find the Docklands Light Rail (DLR) station, and when I did find it the entrance was barred. There was an electronic sign overhead providing extremely useless information, under the circumstances, about where and how one bought tickets for the trains. Nowhere in the Tube journey planner posters or at the station itself was there any indication the DLR would be closed. And there was no suggestion as to how to get to your destination. There were a couple of other people milling around who wanted to get to the same place I did.
This is sort of normal for the UK. Service is generally indifferent here, compared to the States. You notice it especially in restaurants and hotels, and after a while you sort of get used to it. You can’t let it bother you too much, because it’s endemic. It’s also one of the first things the English notice when they go to America; I’ve had several people comment to me that they were amazed with the service one found there. By contrast, everything seems to be done in half-measures around here.
Now as concerns the DLR, I’m sure there was a good reason for closing it down that day, but it didn’t seem to occur to the people in charge that this would inconvenience a lot of folks, and perhaps there was something they could do to minimize the confusion (like maybe changing that inane electronic sign so it said something useful). But no, we were obliged to flag down the next bus we saw and demand instructions from the driver for getting to Island Gardens (poor bugger, he had to tell us one at a time, since only one person could hear what he said through the doorway; I was the last and he was getting rather impatient by the time he spoke to me).
So I found a bus to take me through Docklands to Island Gardens. This bus passed through the Canary Wharf commercial development as well, which is something I have wanted to see for a long time, ever since it bankrupted the Canadian developers Olympia & York a year or so ago. It’s the largest office development the world has ever seen, all new and clean and sparkly on the old Isle of Dogs (a couple years ago there was a National Geograhic article about it and the development’s effect on the people who live in the Docklands). And deserted, especially on Saturday. But it’s supposed to be virtually empty anyway, and no wonder since it’s really out in the middle of nowhere, at least from the perspective of Central London. No one wants to move out there, and some government ministries which were considering it have had to back down in the face of opposition from the civil service.
I imagine it will remain deserted until a Tube line or something runs out there. And the government can’t really do that because it would look too much like direct government support for a commercial enterprise (which it certainly would be). In any case, it will be years before any such transport system is built.
Nonetheless, Canary Warf (with the tallest building in Britain) is an important symbol and potential IRA target, so there is massive security there; they won’t have to worry about any broken windows or graffiti.
The rest of the Docklands district is a slum, as you may have heard, but it’s kind of interesting in that being as poor and shabby a place as it is, not much has changed in some sections for the better part of a century. I saw a number of shopfronts which looked as they must have appeared in Edwardian times, so there was a real historical aspect to the place that you don’t get in central London. However, I can’t recommend going there just to look at Edwardian shopfronts. It really is a slum, after all.
So I got dropped off in a place called Island Gardens (?), and made my way to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.
The tunnel was bored under the River Thames at the turn of the century, and today bears a sign at its entrance warning that the lift (elevator) doesn’t work as often as it should owing to an “illegal” staff cutback with which the local authority had nothing whatever to do. This is pretty typical of the internecine sniping you see among British officialdom. One ministry doesn’t like what the other department is doing, so they go onto the TV about it or put up a sign and air their dirty laundry on the entrance to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. This is especially acute under the Tory government, since most local authorities are run by Labour councils. You also see the permanent civil service standing in defiance of its nominal leadership, the elected government and its ministers. In fact, this is what the television series Yes, Minister is all about, and if you ever get a chance to catch an episode you’re in for a treat.
It’s all rather forbidding, a dark damp hole in the docks with a wide spiral staircase (I avoided the controversial lift). As soon as I entered I heard the far-off strumming of a guitar mingled with the wet clomping of my boots on the steps. When I got to the bottom, the aspect was menacing enough that a Japanese family just in front of me stopped their progress and seemed to be discussing in quiet murmurs whether they should continue on through. I pushed past into a damp tunnel leading further down so that the floor met the ceiling before long, lined for the first few yards with ancient rusted steel reinforcing panels which brushed against my hair as I walked past. My footsteps splashed and bounced off the walls and seemed to reverberate the length of the shaft, which was covered with damp stained tiles once I was past the steel panels. It was wet and cold down there, with dirty water trickling along the floor and my breath condensing into a cloud before my face.
The tuneless guitar became steadily louder, and before long I could see it was an East End busker playing just beyond the center of the tunnel, like a witness to some dark irreversible act. I felt like I was a part of some intrigue, perhaps a hostage exchange, and looked carefully at the faces of the few shabby pedestrians as they drew towards me, looking for signs of their roles in the affair. The busker’s strumming and crooning was random and without talent, but I tossed 50p into his guitar case as I passed, for his contribution to the dreadful tone of the place.
It was nasty in that tunnel, but I was a little sorry when I came to the stairs on the Greenwich side and the drama ended. I ran up the stairs again two at a time.
When I entered the tunnel in the slummy Docklands, sun and clouds were arguing over which was going to get the upper hand that day, but by the time I came out at Greenwich the sun had definitely prevailed. It was a magical tunnel indeed, for the world changed a beat while I was underground and underwater. The first thing I saw as I mounted the final step was the Cutty Sark gloriously rigged.
Greenwich was, apparently, an important naval town, with the old Naval hospital where the Maritime Museum is now and Deptford, the naval shipyard started in the 17th Century, just adjacent upriver (Deptford is, of course, no longer any kind of shipyard. All the ports, docks and yards of London have moved far downriver). Considering it is more or less part of London, it is really a pleasant little town, a sort of touristy center of boutiques and cafes that reminded me a little of Laguna Beach.
It also felt a bit spacious, since the museum is surrounded by a broad lawn and tree-lined streets, while the Royal Observatory is in the middle of a large park. I bought a ticket for £7.50 which got me entrance to the museum, the Cutty Sark and the Royal Observatory (I could have also visited something called the Queen’s House if I wanted to, but it didn’t sound terribly interesting).
Much of the museum is given over to the display of 17th- and 18th Century warships, since beginning in the 17th Century detailed models of all new ships or classes of ships were presented to the Admiralty for study, and the museum still has most of these models. So there is hall after hall of detailed 1:48 wooden models of men-of-war, some of them fully-rigged with sails, arranged in chronological order of development so you can see the line ships growing larger and sprouting ever more cannons as the decades went by.
Entire galleries were given over to subjects of special interest such as the voyages of discovery of Capt. James Cook and the career of Lord Nelson. These were two people I came to the museum specifically to learn more about. Nelson was a prodigy. Conceited beyond belief, he was nevertheless talented and brave, and in the days when capturing enemy ships meant boarding and fighting hand-to-hand for them, he was often one of the first across the rail. He sustained innumerable wounds, eventually losing an arm and finally being felled by a French sniper’s bullet at the moment of victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. You couldn’t dream up a life of more romance and adventure than the one he really lived.
There were exhibits of polar exploration, 18th Century naval warfare (England seemed to be constantly at war at that time), ancient boats dug up around Britain. Finally, there was a hall on 20th Century ships, including, sort of as an afterthought, merchant shipping. There were some good exhibits on naval warfare of the world wars, but the most impressive exhibit for me was a model of a WWII battleship. What was striking was that it was built to the same scale as all the wooden models in the other halls, 1:48, and, being over ten feet long, it dwarfed completely anything made in the centuries before the 20th.
The best thing about the Royal Observatory is that it was built on some of the only actual California-scale topography that can be found around London. It sits on a hill you can actually lose your breath a little climbing, which is really saying something. The hill juts out of nowhere, and I am sure it must be the highest elevation for miles around.
It was built in the 17th Century with an eye to solving the “Longitude Problem,” that is, finding a way for ships to find their longitude at sea. The first Royal astronomer, a guy named Flamsteed, spent 40 years meticulously mapping the heavens, since the only way to accurately measure longitude on earth is by plotting earthly positions in relation to the stars. Eventually, as you know, the longitude line running through the Royal Observatory was adopted as the Prime Meridian, 0°, so at the observatory you can stand with one foot in either hemisphere. The other component to solving the Longitude Problem was time. You had to be able to keep accurate time, even at sea, so you know when to take your measurements of the stars. In the age of pendulum clocks, this was nearly impossible, so Parliament offered a £10,000 reward (a fortune then) for anyone who could build a clock which could keep accurate time at sea. This was such a technical challenge that for much of the 18th Century such a clock was thought of in much the same way we consider perpetual motion machines; physical impossibility.
However, a watchmaker named Hobart (I think) came to the Royal Observatory and spent the next 30 years or more working on this impossible clock. He came up with four designs, each an improvement on the design before it, finally winning the prize with the last one. The Observatory has models of the first three clocks, which are simply ingenious (though not good enough to win the prize). This guy Hobart designed frictionfree machinery, and it really a marvel to study the timepieces they have on display.
I also had a look at the Cutty Sark before find the British Rail station in Greenwich and heading back. Apparently, it’s the last China clipper in existence. The displays inside make you a little nostalgic for the age of the great sailing ships, but then the business of going up into the rigging to set and furl the sails looked a pretty dangerous business, so maybe the sailing ship’s passing isn’t such a bad thing after all.
The Cutty Sark is permanently “mounted” like a model in a dry dock, so you can go down and see the entire hull from the outside. It’s huge; all these ships were colossal. It’s made of iron framing with wooden decks and hull planking, and smells inside like that room I stayed in last year in that old Tudor hunting lodge.
Well, that’s enough travelogue for this week. I’m off to work now. Take care and think about what you want to do with yourselves when you get over to the UK.
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