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Quirky London 13: Crossing the meridian

Posted on 13 February 20102 April 2021 by Rob Ainsley

Where is it? Greenwich observatory, in the park overlooking the old naval college – but possibly not quite where you think.


What’s quirky about it? Your chance to straddle the meridian line. Here, balanced on a knife edge, are the two hemispheres: on one side the mystic east of Woolwich and Dartford and beyond; on the other, the wild west of Lewisham and Brixton.

A steel monument and strip by the Royal Observatory, heavy with queues of visitors intent on Twitpic-ing a holiday snap, show the zero line.

Except it’s not the GPS zero. The line shown by the observatory is the 1884 meridian; today’s zero, at least the one that your GPS will show as 0.0000 longitude, is a hundred metres east in the park.


Why bike there? Greenwich is a lovely, mostly traffic-free, bike ride along the Thames path. In the park, it’s a nice ride up to the observatory for that view . You can see the splendour of the old Naval College, now home to Trinity College of Music, with the blocks of Canary Wharf behind and, over to the east, the exoskeleton of the O2 dome.


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