Probably the biggest surprise I got, visiting the Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, was the statue of General Wolfe. As in “Plains of Abraham” General Wolfe.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to encounter Canadiana during my vacation. And yet, there he was, right beside the Observatory grounds, on the highest bit of the park area. I gather that the good General was a resident of Greenwich, and the statue, apparently, was a presentation of the Marquis de Montcalm in 1930.

Anyway, about the Observatory: it’s definitely worth the rail trip over. (Something I didn’t know: not all of London’s public transport systems are integrated into the Oyster Card scheme. Certainly the Southeastern trains to Greenwich aren’t, although apparently that’s going to change next year.) That’s because although London’s very urban, the park happens to be one of the bigger bits of green space around, and it makes for a welcome hike, though perhaps a bit steep.

It’s a good exhibition they’ve got there, because there are two parts to it: a Meridian walk, and an Astronomy walk. The Meridian walk is important because Greenwich happens to be the Prime Meridian; Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is headquartered here. There’s quite a lot of history on display here, particularly about the development of the chronometer or mechanical clock. (The English had a vested interest, since they needed clocks to help calculate longitude for their fleet of ships. It’s fascinating, the type of engineering breakthroughs that needed to be achieved.)

I also had a chance to look at the Maritime Museum, and I have to be honest: I didn’t find it as compelling as the Observatory. That could be because a lot of the galleries were being renovated for a new exhibition that would be opened next year, and it also could be that it was a more generalized cover than say, a naval museum. There’s a difference: although there’s quite a bit of naval material on display, much more focused on the sea and shipboard exploration. The big exhibit, when I visited, was a display about the search for the Northwest Passage, which was a bit more superficial than I would have liked.

* * * * *

Since I had some time in the afternoon, I sort of figured on going to the Baker Street underground station. And, seeing the wall tiles there displaying silhouettes of the Street’s most famous (fictional) residence, I elected to visit 221B. I was fairly certain that some enterprising fans of the consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes would have set up something for his devoted fans.

And sure enough, they did. At the Sherlock Holmes Museum, they do sell a lot of Holmes memorabilia (deerstalkers, bowler hats, tea cosies, and so on), but if you pay 6 pounds you also get to tour the site — and what a site!

They’ve put a lot of money into recreating the place as a facsimile of what fans of Sherlock Holmes expected to see: the drawing room with “VR” bulletholes in one of the walls, Doctor Watson’s study complete with writing desk, and so on. On the top floor, you can see recreations of famous scenes from Conan Doyle’s short stories, such as the Man with the Twisted Lip, Irene Adler meeting the masked Bohemian prince, the death of Charles Augustus Milverton, and the first picture of the notorious Professor Moriarty. (There’s also a grey-haired actor/guide playing Holmes, in a casual smoking jacket of the period, not very convincingly compared with Rathbone or Brett. Just be polite and smile.)

There’s a pub called the Sherlock Holmes on Northumberland Street, which also recreated the Baker Street setting, but I don’t believe they’re quite as thorough as this one. They do pull a decent pint, though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 18:11 and is filed under Explorations, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.