Royal Greenwich

Your Greenwich visit highlight will be Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Naval Hospital, (1696-1702); a large scale counterpart to his Chelsea Royal Hospital for Army pensioners. Wren's powerfully dramatic masterpiece of Baroque palace architecture with its sweeping waterfront expanse of coupled colonnades is perhaps as great an architectural achievement as his St. Paul's Cathedral, (completed 1711).

Wren intended the splendid presence of this Baroque palace to be admired from the river. Approach it therefore from the Thames and savour its unrivalled and breathtaking visual grandeur of unfolding vistas as did his patron William III, for whom it was built.

There is in fact no better way to reach Greenwich than by water, travelling as did the liveried Royal barges that ferried Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian Kings and Queens through four centuries. Take a morning boat from the Westminster Millennium Pier and enjoy the spectacular one-hour journey down the Thames to Greenwich past Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the grim Tower of London, Tower Bridge, the wharfs of once busy dockland; typically with a witty running commentary from your cockney boatman. Your trip culminates at Greenwich with the imposing vista of Wren's masterpiece, and the spars and rigging of Cutty Sark, dry-docked behind the quay.

The Royal Naval Hospital stands on the foundations of Placentia, the old Tudor palace of Henry VII, (1485-1509); London's principal Royal residence until his son Henry VIII transferred his affections, ladies and court upstream to Hampton Court Palace. Both Henry VIII and his two daughters Mary and Elizabeth were born there, and it remained in use through successive reigns until falling into disrepair during the Puritan interregnum of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II demolished Tudor Placentia and embarked upon the erection of a new palace there in the newly fashionable classical Renaissance style. It was this uncompleted Greenwich palace that Wren enlarged, extended and transformed for William III, from chaste Renaissance lines into the imposing Baroque vista of the king's Royal Naval Hospital, (1696-1702). In the visual centre of the entire complex he left the restrained Renaissance Queen's House, designed earlier, (1616-35), by Inigo Jones for the Queen Consorts of his grandfather, James I, and father, Charles I.

The hospital housed 3,000 naval pensioners in its post-Napoleonic Wars heyday before becoming the Royal Naval College in 1873. It now houses the National Maritime Museum, opened by George VI in 1937.

While visiting, be sure to see the remarkable Painted Hall, decorated by Sir James Thornhill between 1708 and 1727. Nelson lay in state here before his funeral and interment in St. Paul's Cathedral. See also the Chapel, used as a location in Four weddings and a Funeral.

In the surrounding Royal Park, formerly the grounds of Placentia Palace, is Wren's charming Royal Observatory, commissioned by Charles II to determine longitude. It is built on the foundations of Henry VIII's hunting lodge and castle folly. The Old Royal Observatory, within the observatory, is a camera obscura that offers a fine reflected image of London's landmarks.

While in Greenwich, pause and soak up the Victorian atmosphere at the riverfront Trafalgar Tavern, a grand old pub with sweeping views over the Thames. Built in 1837 on the site of a yet older watermen's hostelry, the pub still serves its renowned, crisply fried Whitebait, (once caught here in the tidal reaches of the Thames but now imported); a speciality enjoyed there by literary giants Charles Dickens, (who immortalised it in Our Mutual Friend), William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, and Victoria's Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone.

The National Maritime Museum buildings including the Queen's house are available for hire as venue for weddings, civil commitment ceremonies, receptions and corporate events.

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