Greenwich and Camden

I enjoy walking Camden Market in the afternoon.

– Taylor Swift, London Boy

There is a part of London called Camden, the north end of which is Camden Market. Elizabeth and I visited it twice back in December. It has a very eclectic collection of shops, including Boom Cat Books which is my favorite, not least because of its seemingly random open hours. There is also a canal with manual locks. Elizabeth and I got to see a canal boat with a partying collection of misty twenty-somethings successfully navigate this one along the Regents Canal:

Six miles due southeast of Camden Market, at 51.477° N, 0.000° W, lies the Greenwich Observatory, where one learns that if brilliant scientists obsess about a question, and belong to an empire, then they get to define, for the whole planet, where and when a day begins. In this case the question concerned how to define coordinates for celestial objects. For example, if László in Budapest sees something interesting through his telescope, and he wants to send a letter to Nigel in London telling him where to look, what can he say more accurate than “between Cassiopeia and Andromeda.” At Greenwich, between 1721 and 1851, a few telescopes called “transits” were erected which moved along only one axis. At one angle they could see the North Star, and from there the telescope tilted perfectly south so that at any given time the telescope was able to see only a circle’s-worth of stars along a celestial great circle passing through the North Star. If an astronomer wanted to see another star, he had to wait until that star made its transit, thanks to the Earth’s rotation, through that great circle. Here is the current, most recent transit, built in 1851.

In 1721, Edmond Halley (of the comet), second Astronomer Royal, set up a transit a bit west of this one. This defined a ground-based meridian line, really half of a great circle, passing through the north and south poles, and his telescope.

The first picture shows the Greenwich Observatory. Just left of the right-most window is a vertical bar showing where Halley’s original meridian was. For a while, this was 0.000°W; but about 20 years later, James Bradley, third Astronomer Royal, constructed a newer and better transit, just right of where the right-most sitting person is in the picture above, by the cutout in the roof, and this became 0.000°W. Really! Every meridian on the planet moved east by a few meters. Coming soon to a theater near you: Clever People and the Empires that Enable Them. Finally, in 1851, George Airy constructed the transit pictured above, which lies behind the open doorway with the white door and gathered crowd, again moving all the world’s meridians a bit further east; but here they have stayed.

Coming out of that doorway is the Prime Meridian, heading as north as north can be across the pavement, down the wall, out into the field, across the Thames, passing east of Camden Market, missing Scotland barely but entirely, eventually coming to the north pole without making landfall after exiting England near Tunstall. The last picture is pure peer pressure. Everyone was doing it.

Fun fact: Back in Bradley’s time (Astronomer Royal #3) his meridian was adopted as the basepoint for land survey, and is still in use in England to this day, slightly west of the actual Prime Meridian.

To get to the Royal Observatory from central London, one gets off at the Cutty Sark tube stop.

This noble, historied ship sits in harbor with a visitor center built around it. My time constraints didn’t permit me to visit it, so all I will say about it is that it gives the impression that some day it will unfurl and hoist its sails, burst from its visitor center prison, and sail off into further adventures.

But between the Cutty Sark tube stop and the Royal Observatory one is confronted by the imposing and impressive Old Royal Naval College.

Christopher Wren was asked to design this campus, but without obstructing the queen’s view of the river despite the fact that the land lay directly in the way, and that he was required to integrate prior construction into his plan. The first two pictures shows the queen’s house, as seen from the center of campus. the 3rd shows the view of the river from about the same point. His solution was to design four nearly-standalone quadrants, with a “view corridor” running through their middle.

The Painted Hall is probably the most famous portion of the ORNC. Sir James Thornhill is the artist behind the paintings, reportedly paid “by the yard,” which is perhaps why every paintable inch has some decoration. The art makes heavy use of trompe-l’œil, meaning “trick the eye,” to give the illusion of 3D elements on a flat surface. It’s more than just shadow and light; somehow the 3D object actually look different in one location than they do in another, just as an actual 3D object would! I walked back and forth trying to understand the effect, but I never could. Like Cutty Sark in its visitor center, I am prisoner within my visual cortex. This hall was built to provide food and shelter for destitute sailors who had served England.

The second-most famous building is the Chapel of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

From the Painted Hall one may reach the chapel by walking underground through the Ripley tunnel, shown in the first picture. Half-way along is the Skittles Hall, where one can play a version of manual-reset bowling (second picture). Built over a hundred years ago, this is still in use, and very loud! In the third picture is the front of the chapel, where an altar would be.

Bringing me to London on this day was a plan to go to a thrash metal contest/concert with my friend Katy, who is a fan of the band Yur Mum which was competing. It was while straddling the meridian line that I thought, for the first time, to check how long it would take to get from Greenwich to Hounslow Central Station where we were to meet at 2pm. I thought it would be 30 minutes at the most, but my app said 80 minutes! Some day I will be more proactive about testing my assumptions. So with a jolt I made my way back to the Underground, glancing longingly and regretfully at the Cutty Sark, and made my way to Hounslow, arriving at 1:50. Phew! We had lunch at the Coach and Horses pub which was really great, for food and atmosphere.

Katy ordered a “pie.” Somehow I’d managed to live in England for 2 months without encountering a “pie,” which, it turns out, is savory, not sweet. I couldn’t resist the picture – though I wish I had paid more attention to the diner than the dinner and not cut off her head. We didn’t have alcohol, but I thought it interesting that the beer they served was brewed in Camden, which is where Katy and I headed next to walk around, sight-see, and then attend the contest.

Here are three pictures from Camden Market. The last is a statue of singer Amy Winehouse who lived in Camden, and died at age 27 apparently not intentionally, by ingesting too much vodka into her bulimia-ravaged body. I am sure she had more gifts to share with the world, stolen by those poor life choices so typical of the ungrounded.

Finally we went to the concert at its stated start time, 6pm. There was no line, we were the first people there, and there was no sign of a band; so we left and walked along the river for another 45 minutes. I’ve never seen such a thing, but also, I’ve never tried anything like a thrash metal (yes, you had read that correctly above) concert either. Sabbatical – the season of trying new things.

The first picture shows what the concert looked like pretty much the whole time, through all five bands. Yur Mum was definitely the best, and we learned later that they had won the evening. They were one of two bands that had any melody in their music, and easily ten times as much melody as the other one. I love that second picture because (in addition to not cutting off Katy’s head) it shows how differently the two of us were dressed compared to the rest of the (small) crowd: Katy dressed as for a dinner party, and I as a teacher, like in the Amy Winehouse picture. I chatted with a music reporter who was writing up the event, and in response to one of my questions he said, “Well, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve decided there is no bad music, just music that I don’t like.” What do you think? I 75% agree, but 25% disagree.

My train back to Oxford left at 11:15pm, so at about 10:15 we left the concert, during the last (and worst) band, and rode the subway together for a while – long enough to see that ad for Texas! – and then parted. My morning train had arrived at Marleybone train station, so I headed back there. To “Marleybone.” Still not proactive about testing assumptions, I had assumed that “Marleybone” was a train station. It is not. It is a neighborhood. So when I “arrived” according to my GPS, I was in the middle of a residential neighborhood, at 10:50pm. What?! So I searched for “Marleybone Station,” which is a train station, and it was a 19-minute walk, or 18-minute bus/underground trip. So I jogged, made it in 9 minutes, looked at the departures board, and lo, no 11:15 train to Oxford. What?! Consulting my ticket I discovered that though my round-trip ticket arrived at Marleybone, it departed Paddington. What?! I’m not good at proactive, but I can bring it when it comes to being active. So I jogged over to a ticket taker on the platform, and asked for the fastest way to get to Paddington. He said I could make it if I went quickly “that way,” and he pointed. As I turned to leave a lady hurried up to him asking about the train to Oxford. “Platform 5, ten minutes,” he said. What?! So I said “I’m going to Oxford. Can I just use this ticket?” and I showed him my ticket. He said “Oh, they’ve stopped all trains out of Paddington tonight. Just take this one.” So somehow, I non-proactively, accidentally, went to the right station, and got on a train that departed ten minutes earlier than my original train. As my brother Tom pointed out, sometimes God comps the clueless with a guardian angel; in my case, a lady asking about the train to Oxford.