Greenwich: We Visit The Eastern Hemispehere

We were off at 9:15 this morning, a morning cold and overcast enough that we all wore our rashminas. Under that sky of grey in this very serious district of The City, just after the hour when people are at their offices, Toshiba or British Telecom, when they've just begun the first phone conference of the day, they look out their windows to see a the last stragglers in suits heading into the building, and this quartet of bright, mango-coloured foreigners, like hand-coloured figures in a black and white postcard. "Well, you won't lose each other!" laughs a policewoman on a white horse heading up to St. Paul's.

The Millennium Bridge is nearly deserted, and of course the Tate Modern is still closed, big barriers down over the portals where so many people were coming and going on that first sunny day we were here. We had wanted to visit its bookshop, but now we revise our plan, and decide to walk down river on the south bank to the HMS Belfast, which we can see about a kilometre away, and which should open at 10:30: we can buy Galen a new folding tube map to replace the one he has lost.

The Thames river walk is a wide paved pedestrian way with office buildings along the right hand, and on the left hand a stone benching and balustrade over a 5 metre drop down to the water. It leads along the Thames until you get to Southwark bridge, where oddly there is no pedestrian underpass: with no one else around in the morning light, you climb stone stairs to street level, run across it in front of a bus and without a crosswalk, and descend stairs the other side. Soon the whole riverwalk thing breaks down, and you resort to the nearest tiny street to the river, walking through small, one-of-a-kind, stone-paved alleys to discover the replica of the Golden Hinde moored in front of you in a tiny water-alley of its own, and a crowd of students at its gangplank attending to a performer briefing them on how to come aboard ("And don't fall overboard because we will not come back for you! I shall find it very funny but you shall not!"). Through back alleys past Southwark Cathedral (a man in a first-floor office here, smiling and pointing at us), and through a dark street-tunnel under the approach to London Bridge. Now we're in the busy street outside London Dungeon, the whole area feeling like it is below ground because of the mass of London Bridge above it. Turn into Hay's Galleria, and out onto the river walk again. The HMS Belfast is just opening, a crowd of French high schoolers running and playing on the pavement as they wait...

Conveniently, just up river is the London Bridge City Pier, a floating pier connected by a sloping covered footway down from the river walk, with an enclosed and heated ticket office/waiting room built on it from glass and steel. It is not unlike an Underground stop on the river: an electric sign announces the minutes to the arrival of the next river service, and where it's going.

The Thames Clipper ("Cyclone Clipper" was our ship) pulls up a few minutes later and we step on board, into a big room of plush chairs arranged in rows facing forward, like an oversized airliner. The clipper accelerates away from the wharf and we either grab a handhold or are pushed back into our seats. It's a big, overpowered catamaran, and as we slice down river we pass other, slower tourist boats--and call in rapid succession at places like Tower Bridge and Canary Wharf. Building after building slips by, as if we're on the Grand Canal in Venice. In no time we're stepping off at Greenwich and thinking that was the funnest way to travel anywhere around London.

We walk up through Greenwich streets past a big scaffolding that is presumably the Cutty Sark under renovation. To get to the National Maritime Museum we pass through the very stately campus of the Old Royal Naval College, a largely deserted yet palatial collection of white-columned buildings set around green lawns. On one lawn they were setting up a "Beer and Jazz festival," a reminder that the upcoming weekend would be a Bank Holiday. The museum is in yet another stately white palace, free, as are most government museums here.

Dodging school groups (each school has its own uniform, and I have to say they look quite smart) we see many things: an actual note left behind by the men of the Franklyn Expedition; a giant ship simulator where five big video screens fill my view so effectively I could feel the deck rolling under my feet (Galen docked a ferry in Sydney harbour, while Will piloted a lifeboat to rescue a swimmer near a burning oil tanker); the hands-on Morse Code stations (Morgan and Kate telegraph to Galen L-U-N-C-H T-I-M-E); and a full-scale replica of the James Caird, in which Shackleton and men sailed to South Georgia.

Behind the museum, and on a hilltop in a tree-filled park, the Observatory. A small brick building with little ornament, hardly suggestive of its monumental function as the definitive location of longitude 0. In the company of many other pilgrims (the sun is now out and it's turning into a beautiful late-Spring day) we ascend along paved paths to it, and pay our respects at the line laid in steel running across the building's courtyard. Judging by the other people who want thier pictures taken straddling it (as we do) this is clearly a place of interest to more than the map-makers of the world. A willingly gullible tourist for things like this, I buy a fridge magnet in the small gift shop, that reads "Prime Meridian Of The World." I set my watch by the Observatory's clock.

We walk down out of the leafy park and into the streets of Greenwich again. There are so many good looking restaurants and book stores here we could spend a week in Greenwich alone. But we hurry on to the DLR: the Docklands Light Rail, a new branch of the Underground that Galen's eager to travel. Although the actual experience is pretty much like riding the Underground: down long escalators, many turns through tunnels, reading signs, and then the train. Rocking and bumping along, it emerges above ground through the Canary Wharf area (a zone of skyscrapers, which are otherwise rare in London. Do they have bedrock here,or is there another reason?) and we ride it to "Bank" and thence home to St. Paul's.

But we have one more mission for the day: our accumulated treasure form London needs to be mailed home, because our packs have no room for booty. We set out again on foot over the Millennium Bridge, crowded with happy afternoon sightsee-ers, and make our way through Tate Modern (no good art supplies in the bookstore) through back streets to Blackfriars, a noisy and crowded, can't-hear-yourself-think, watch-out-for-that-bus avenue, headed south away from the river. It's approaching five, and I'm worried the post office will close soon. After a few minutes of speed-walking however, it's in sight. They sell a wonderful red box for international shipping that's just right for us: brilliant. I get in the queue to pay for sending it.

At this point I notice that the post office clock says it's only 4:30. That's a bit strange. I mean, didn't I just set my watch at the Greenwich Observatory? Hmm. After paying (and the man behind the thick glass window helpfully coaches me in removing a little weight from the box and adding it to the envelope we're also sending, to reduce to overall price), I check with Kate. Her watch says 4:30 too. The boys collapse in fits of laughter at Dad's unreliable timekeeping. There was plenty of time! It was, in fact, a lucky mistake.

Dinner in the hostel's cafeteria.