Thames to Greenwich: Cutty Sark and the Meridian

Greenwich is a river-boat ride down the Thames from Westminster. The Royal Observatory was commissioned by Charles II in 1675 on the hilltop site of Greenwich Castle, chosen by Christopher Wren, to fix the positions of the stars for finding longitude at sea; John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal, and the observatory, through which the Greenwich Meridian runs, gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time. Below it the Painted Hall of the old naval hospital was painted by James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726, and 3,700 square metres of it were conserved from 2014. By the river is the Cutty Sark, built at Dumbarton in 1869, one of the last tea clippers and one of the fastest — she had only a few years in the tea trade before the Suez Canal, opened the same year, gave the route to steamships, and then carried wool from Australia.