Having a Greenwich Mean Time

Having a mean time

"What's the time?" It was an innocent enough question, but given that we were, in the Greenwich Royal Observatory, surrounded by all manner of clocks and timepieces dating back hundreds of years, only a few metres from the Prime Meridian of the World, an unintentionally apposite one. 
It was almost noon Greenwich Mean Time and we were wondering if something special might happen to signify it. When we had seen it half an hour earlier, the line - a silver strip of metal running along the ground to a huge astrolobe - had been occupied by three Japanese girls taking photos of themselves stood astride the Meridian Line, with one foot in each hemisphere.  At midday the girls were still there and still taking pictures. How many photos did they want?!

Nothing happens at noon, but, on one exhibit we read about the big orange time-ball drop which happens at precisely 1pm to enable everyone in sight to set their clocks by it. Apparently the astronomers would be too busy at midday to signal then and had to wait for a less auspicious time. Even though the observatory buildings and exhibits were interesting, particularly the Great Equatorial Telescope (the largest in the UK), there wasn't enough to keep us there for another hour. So after we'd taken our obligatory photo astride the Meridian, and savoured the spectacular view across London in the winter sunshine, we headed next door, to the Planetarium. 

There was certainly enough to look at and play with in there, like building your own lunar lander, but we had to compete with hundreds of schoolchildren who were far more tenacious than us. Their constant chatter finally drove us into the refuge of the Gallery and a superb exhibition of the winning entries in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Some of the images of galaxies and nebulae were out of this world...er, of course.

The special Combo ticket we'd bought included entry to the Cutty Sark in its dry dock on the Greenwich waterfront. The world's sole surviving tea clipper, famed for its record- breaking passages, has been painstakingly preserved and lifted to allow you to explore underneath her hull. There were several interactive exhibits on her decks which weren't filled with screaming schoolchildren, so we were able to have a play at navigating a ship home from Australia using the trade winds. Not being nautical types, we got shipwrecked several times before getting the hang of it.

Maratime Museum

The nearby National Maritime Museum, the world's largest of its kind, is full of the kind of stuff you'd expect, with exhibitions of famous seafaring explorers (mainly British), the history of sea trade and particularly the British East India Company, and a whole gallery on maritime safety and the significant British contributions to it. 

By the time we left, the Queen's House next door was closed. We weren't too bothered, it's just an art gallery. But we were devastated that, with the light failing, we couldn't properly see "London's Largest Herbaceous Border" at the front of it. Yeah, right.

Underneath the Cutty Sark

Time had run out on our day in Greenwich. Rather than the setting sun calling time, it was the imminent expiry of the car park pay-and-display ticket. Clocks and the monitoring of time are now an essential part of everyday life. We wondered if the first astrologers realised what a monster they had unleashed when they first started to study the stars and the Earth's place within them.