In a way, this is a placeholder for a future visit to a place that has history upon history and significance on significance. Greenwich, once a suburb and now a borough of London, has important ship museums, historic churches, the Greenwich Meridian and even Christopher Wren’s largest building project, the old Royal Naval College.
Sadly, I left myself with no real time for all that on a last afternoon before leaving London. The best I could do was a short dash to the heart of Greenwich, starting with a ride on the Docklands Light Railway to Island Gardens on the opposite shore of the Thames.
At Island Gardens, there’s an entrance to the pedestrian tunnel built over a hundred years ago for dockworkers. I planned to to walk to Greenwich after taking pictures across the water. Unfortunately, the lift was out of order, and I wasn’t up to the stairs.
Of course, these days there are numbers of easier ways to reach Greenwich; ferries on the river and Tube stations are there, and an extension of the DLR, which I took one more stop to Maritime Greenwich, the name for the collection of significant sites that’s now a designated UNESCO Heritage site
Leaving the station, one of the first landmarks to appear was the tower of St Alfege’s church, built in 1714 by Nicholas Hawksmoor, architect of many London churches. This one replaced an 11th-century church that collapsed in a 1710 storm; its foundations had been weakened by thousands of burials inside and outside the church.
The most prominent feature in quick sight is the clipper Cutty Sark, one of the last and one of the fastest of the China clippers. She’s been a museum ship since the 1950s, with a checkered history. When I first visited in 1998, the ship was in a permanent drydock. A 2007 fire during restoration and a later fire led to a new restoration, which included lifting the ship 10 feet and building new supports under it; the glass of the resulting building is meant to suggest water.
The museum was closed for the day, but it’s possible to see the hull of the ship through the glass… and to be warned against climbing.
Catty-corner to Cutty Sark is a small pub, named for Gipsy Moth IV, the 54-foot ketch sailed by Francis Chichester in 1966, the first man to sail a complete circuit of the globe in a one-man boat. Gipsy Moth was on display for many years next to Cutty Sark. After his feat, Chichester was knighted by Queen Elizabeth using the same sword used by Elizabeth I to knight Francis Drake 400 years before.
On the Greenwich side, the other end of the tunnel and views across the river to the Island Gardens entrance, and to huge new development on the Isle of Dogs, now commonly referred to as Canary Wharf after its largest part.
