Travel blog & tips on a budget from a 30 year old blogger

5 Reasons To Visit Greenwich, London

Europe London
Posted: April 21, 2012

Greenwich, the home of longitude and the Cutty Sark, is no longer an outpost on the Thames, but a thriving town on the Jubilee line. You can now visit Greenwich by Tube, DLR and boat.

I went to Greenwich on Easter Sunday and there was so much to see, I could easily have spent two days here.  If you have never been to Greenwich, take the clipper boat (which offers you a discount rate if you have bought a travel card to travel within London).

1) Greenwich Market

Greenwich market is open Tuesdays to Sundays 10:00am – 5:30pm and on Bank Holidays. This undercover market is full of stalls selling a wide range of handcrafted, personalised and British goods.  I went to the Department of Works  stall which sell unique t-shirts and where the owner gave me a free tshirt, so thank you very much. There was also a photography stall which sells a number of photos of London. We had lunch in the market, an American sausage baguette, fresh from the bbq, well needed on a cold spring day.

Greenwich Market - Visiting Greenwich - being30.com

2) Greenwich Park

The 181 acre park is the oldest Royal Park and home to Red and Fallow deer.  It is a relaxing place to visit, right in the heart of London.  There are fantastic views from the top of the hill, where you can see all of Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome. Eleven Olympic and Paralympic events will take places across the six Royal Parks including Greenwich.

Greenwich Park

3) Millenium Dome

After £700 million was spent on this dome for the year 2000, it has now been rebranded as the O2 area which hosts a number of shows a year. I went here to see Usher in early 2011.  It was a great venue, but they still need to work out to get 75,000 people that attend the concert out of the arena and onto the tube without taking an hour.

4) Greenwich Mean Time

The Royal Observatory and the courtyard is home to Greenwich Mean Time.  As the sea trade and travel increased during the 19th century, there was a need to have a common world wide standard for timekeeping. The current Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude) was set up following the development of an accurate clock (a chronometer) by Harrison which could be used at sea. In 1884, an international agreement by 25 countries agreed that zero degrees longitude would be located in Greenwich. The Royal Observatory is open every day 10:00 – 17:00, last admission is 30 minutes before closure.  I would try and get there at least 1 or 2 hours before it closes.  You want to take your time going through, reading and learning about the Harrison’s sea clocks and take a photo of yourself in the Meridian Court Yard, with one foot in the west and one in the east on the Prime Meridian of the World.

Royal Observatory - Visiting Greenwich - being30.com

5) The Cutty Sark

The ship has been completely restored since a fire destroyed it in 2007. The Cutty Shark  was built in 1869 in Scotland was the at one most the most famous of the great clippers, in the nineteenth century which traversed the world’s major shipping routes.  However, when steam took over, the ship was retired in the 1950s to Greenwich and preserved as a museum ship.  The restoration project since 2007 has raised the ship three metres off the ground so visitors are able to enter from beneath and visit the new museum that has been built under the ship.

Cutty Sark - Visiting Greenwich - being30.com

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