Walk Greenwich,
your way.

Greenwich is the only London neighbourhood that has shaped the rest of the world more than the world has shaped it. Time itself - the 24-hour clock you wear on your wrist, the global standard for "what time is it now" - is set from this hill, by international agreement, since 1884. The 0° meridian of longitude - the line from which every other point on Earth is mapped east or west - passes through the building behind you. The British naval power that mapped most of the world's coastlines for two centuries trained its officers here. The clippers that brought tea from China docked at the river immediately below. Greenwich is small enough that you can walk all of it in a day, and substantial enough that the day shapes how you understand the rest of the world.

From royal palace to royal hospital

The Greenwich riverside has been royal property since the 1430s. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester built a palace here in 1433, surrounded by hunting parks - the origin of Greenwich Park, the oldest enclosed royal park in London. Henry VII rebuilt the palace as the Palace of Placentia in 1498. Henry VIII was born in the palace in 1491; Mary I in 1516; Elizabeth I in 1533. The palace was where Anne Boleyn was arrested in 1536. The Tudors and the early Stuarts lived here as much as at Whitehall.

Charles II began to replace the medieval palace with a new Baroque palace in 1664, but the work stopped in 1672 with only one wing complete. The Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs preferred St James's Palace and later Windsor; Greenwich was abandoned. In 1694 Queen Mary II - whose husband William III had won the Battle of La Hogue at sea in 1692 - ordered the half-built palace converted into a hospital for retired naval seamen, "The Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich". Christopher Wren was the architect; he worked here from 1696 until his death in 1723, designing the four quadrangles around the Queen's House, with John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor as deputies. The hospital received its first pensioners in 1705 and continued as a naval pensioners' hospital until 1869.

The Painted Hall

James Thornhill - the English Baroque painter and master of the Royal Society of Arts - was commissioned in 1707 to paint the dining hall ceiling of the Naval Hospital. He spent 19 years on it. The Lower Hall ceiling depicts William III, Mary II and an allegory of Peace and Liberty defeating Tyranny. The Upper Hall continues with Queen Anne and George I. The walls add panels of British naval history. The result is one of the largest painted Baroque interiors in Europe - about 200,000 square feet of painting, comparable in scale and quality to the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The hall was used as the sailors' dining room until 1824 (the pensioners reportedly hated it - the painted figures glared down at them while they ate). It then served various ceremonial purposes; Nelson's body lay in state here for three days in January 1806 before being taken up the Thames to St Paul's. The Painted Hall was restored 2016-2019 - the painting was cleaned, the lighting reworked, the interior repointed. Today entry is £15 with included audio guide; visit numbers are low compared with other major London paintings, partly because Greenwich is a half-day from central London. The hall is one of the most underrated treasures in the city.

The Observatory and the Prime Meridian

Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 to "find the so-much desired longitude" - the problem of how to determine ships' east-west position at sea. Christopher Wren designed the small brick observatory building on the hill above Greenwich (his only surviving secular commission outside the City of London). John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal; the work of finding longitude - mostly through better lunar tables and, eventually, better clocks - continued for about a century.

John Harrison's marine chronometers - H1 (1735), H2 (1741), H3 (1759) and H4 (1761) - finally solved the longitude problem by making clocks accurate enough to keep time at sea. H4 was tested on a 1761-62 voyage to Jamaica and lost only 5 seconds in 81 days. Harrison's four chronometers are now on display at the Observatory - one of the most beautiful and important sets of scientific instruments in the world. The 1953 dramatisation Longitude (Dava Sobel's bestseller; the 2000 Granada Television film with Michael Gambon) told Harrison's story to a wider audience.

The Prime Meridian itself was established at Greenwich by international agreement at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington. 25 countries voted for Greenwich as 0° longitude; the French initially abstained (in protest at a non-Paris meridian) but adopted GMT in 1911. The brass strip in the Observatory courtyard marks 0° on the ground; you stand with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one foot in the western. The Observatory is now part of Royal Museums Greenwich (along with the National Maritime Museum and the Queen's House) and charges admission (£18+) to enter the historic buildings. The courtyard with the brass strip is included with admission; the surrounding park views are free.

The Cutty Sark and the maritime museum

The Cutty Sark was launched in 1869 in Dumbarton, Scotland, as a clipper for the China tea trade. By the time she was finished, however, the new Suez Canal was about to open, making steamships much more economical for the tea route. The Cutty Sark mostly carried wool from Australia and various other cargoes; she was always a fast ship - she once sailed from Newcastle, Australia to London in 73 days - but never as profitable as her builders hoped. After a Portuguese commercial period 1895-1922, she was bought by a retired British captain for £3,750 and converted into a cadet training ship. From 1954 she was permanently dry-docked at Greenwich as a museum.

On 21 May 2007 a fire severely damaged the ship; about 50% of the surviving wooden hull was destroyed. The £50m restoration completed in 2012 lifted the entire ship 3 metres into the air on glass supports, so visitors can walk underneath the hull (the keel, the propeller, the underwater design) - a unique perspective on a 19th-century sailing ship. Entry is £25. The National Maritime Museum next door (free admission, the world's largest maritime museum, including Nelson's uniform from the Battle of Trafalgar - the actual one, with the musket-ball hole through the shoulder) and the Queen's House (free, Inigo Jones's first English Palladian building of 1635, holding the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I) complete the Royal Museums Greenwich cluster.

The wider neighbourhood

Maritime Greenwich was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997 - the Queen's House, the Old Royal Naval College, the Observatory, Greenwich Park, the National Maritime Museum, the Cutty Sark, the Greenwich riverside, and the Royal Observatory's astronomical work. The wider Greenwich town - the streets between Cutty Sark and the rail station - is a working London neighbourhood with Georgian and Victorian houses, the indoor Greenwich Market, several good pubs (the Trafalgar Tavern on the river, the Spanish Galleon on College Approach), restaurants, and the Foot Tunnel under the river to the Isle of Dogs.

The 2012 Olympics used Greenwich Park for the equestrian events, including dressage and the cross-country phase of the modern pentathlon. The temporary stadium was removed after the Games and the park returned to normal - free, open daily, with the deer enclosure in the south-east corner and the Observatory at the top of the hill. The view from the hill is, as it has been since 1675, the most-painted view in London.