Greenwich

The London Borough of Greenwich covers the areas of Greenwich, Woolwich, Eltham, Charlton and Plumstead. Greenwich itself is a small and fairly fashionable area beside the river. Greenwich village has a crafts market, a junk market, lots of second-hand bookshops, and lots of touristy shops selling expensive useless items. The tourists come to see the Royal Observatory, from where Greenwich Mean Time is calculated; the Cutty Sark, a famous 'tea clipper' sailing ship; the Gipsy Moth, (in which Sir Francis Chichester sailed round the world); the Queen's House (designed by Inigo Jones) and the National Maritime Museum. They also come to take boat trips up the Thames, and to walk through the Greenwich foot tunnel under the river. Also here is the Millennium Dome a notorious piece of bad planning originally designed as a major tourist attraction, now closed.

Greenwich Park, behind the Maritime Museum, is a particularly nice park to spend your time in, and I should know because I lived beside it for years. The Royal Observatory is inside the park, on top of a high hill from which you can see right across the city on a clear day. The London Marathon starts here every year.

Greenwich is the home of the prime meridian, the zero line from which longitude East and West are measured. (A touristy thing to do is stand with one foot in each of the Eastern and Western hemispheres.) It is also home of Greenwich mean time (GMT), and there is still a telescope in the Royal observatory, on the prime meridian, to observe when the sun hits noon. Greenwich defines the exact center of one of the 24 time zones in the world. The International Date line is arranged so that when it is between noon and 1 o'clock pm at Greenwich, all time zones in the world agree what day it is.

The Maritime museum at Greenwich has a marvellous array of clocks, a visit is highly recommended. A history of the relatively recent technology of timekeeping is on display. Many many clocks of all types can be seen - the very first (almost)pocket-sized watches, with remarkable accuracy for their era and size, grandfather clocks, sundials, even a whimsical mechanical clock that uses ballbearings and seesaws. Go see it.

Pronunciation: The first half rhymes with 'men', the second sounds like 'itch'. The double 'e' is actually a short sound, and the 'w' is not voiced.