Greenwich architecture and views
The Queen's House | The Royal Observatory | The modern era
Greenwich presents the visitor with a new perspective on London, a vantage point steeped in the capital’s royal, military and scientific history, with vistas that showcase everything from classical architecture to some of the city's most adventurous new buildings. Maritime Greenwich is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the grand views and architectural unity are the result of centuries of construction and changing uses. Today, the site is divided between the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, alongside the Old Royal Naval College (now home to the University of Greenwich and Trinity College of Music).
The Queen’s House, Greenwich
Greenwich has long been a centre for British royalty, with Tudors and Stuarts occupying the large Palace of Greenwich, located by the Thames on the site of what is now the Old Royal Naval College. In 1616, the architect Inigo Jones was commissioned to build a garden villa for James I's queen, Anne of Denmark on a site overlooking the Thames as it curves around the Isle of Dogs to the north. Anne died just three years later, and work on the Queen's House stopped. It only recommenced for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, after 1629 and the House was only fully finished about 1638.
Jones was ostensibly a surveyor and event organiser, but he had also travelled to Italy and studied classical architecture, in particular the geometric precision and chaste detailing of the Renaissance. As a result, the Queen’s House represents a turning point in English architecture, the break with Elizabethan complexity and the introduction of the restrained Palladian classicism that came to define official architecture for centuries to come.
The centrepiece of the house is the Great Hall, a perfect cube that forms the geometric and architectural heart of the design. The double-story space measures 40 X 40 feet, with a first floor gallery overlooking the geometric black-and-white marble floor. The Queen's House also contains the famed Tulip Stairs, a delicate spiral that ascends up through the building beneath a glass lantern. Each tread is both cantilevered from the wall and supported by the stair below, allowing the stairway to have no central support.
The Royal Hospital for Seamen
The Queen's House eventually formed the centrepiece of Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital for Seamen, begun in 1696 on the site of the riverside Tudor Palace, which was cleared away from the 1670s onward. Designed in conjunction with his pupil Nicholas Hawksmoor, Wren arranged the new structure along an axis that centred on the Queen's House, allowing it a view of the river through the twin pavilions of the Hospital.
After Wren’s death in 1723, work continued under Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh, Colen Campbell and Thomas Ripley until 1751. Sir James Thornhill decorated the famous Painted Hall from 1707 to 1726 and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart reconstructed Ripley’s Chapel interior after a catastrophic fire in 1779. From 1705 on the Hospital was a residential home for naval invalids – the Greenwich Pensioners – very similar to its earlier and continuing sister institution, the Royal Hospital for soldiers at Chelsea. However, because of declining demand and other naval welfare arrangements, it closed in 1869 and from 1872 to 1998 became the Royal Naval College ‘the Navy’s university’. Since then it has been managed for public benefit by the Greenwich Foundation for the the Old Royal Naval College, with the Painted Hall Chapel and grounds open to the public, and the buildings in university use.
In 1807 the Queen's House itself became home for an orphanage school, the Royal Naval Asylum, with colonnades and flanking wings added to east and west. In the 1820s this merged with the Greenwich Hospital School, founded in 1712. It was formally renamed the Royal Hospital School in 1892 and moved to Holbrook, Suffolk, in 1933, after which the Greenwich buildings were converted to house the newly founded National Maritime Museum.
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Royal Observatory has also seen change and renewal during its lifetime. The Observatory dates back to 1675, when Charles II appointed John Flamsteed to the position of Astronomer Royal. The impetus was navigation, and the urgent need to discover a means for sailors to determine their longitude (east-west position) at sea. The stars were initially thought to hold the key to finding longitude, but Flamsteed (1646–1719) showed that calculations based purely on current astronomical data would not be enough, paving the way for the establishment of the Observatory.
The original building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, himself a keen astronomer. Located on a bluff at the very edge of Blackheath, just before the land falls steeply away down to the river, what is now known as Flamsteed House was constructed from spare building materials from the Tower of London and a Tudor fort at Tilbury to save money. Wren was resourceful, and his knowledge of architecture was gleaned from historical treatises and hands-on experience of construction techniques and craft skills. Architecture and mathematics were closely allied, and Wren's skill at the latter enabled him to develop complex structural and decorative elements, all bound up in harmonious classicism. Like (and through the influence of) Inigo Jones he was inspired in part by the works of the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius, who defined the qualities of architecture as firmitas, utilitas, venustas: durability, functionality and beauty.
The centrepiece of Wren's Flamsteed House was the Octagon Room, with tall windows and an elaborate plaster ceiling. One façade was orientated orientated north, though not exactly enough to allow certain types of observation, since another of the economies was building the Observatory on the pre-existing foundations of a demolished medieval tower, latterly called Greenwich Castle. The Octagon Room housed the original observatory and Flamsteed's eccentric collection of instruments, above the Astronomer Royal's own quarters. These were to be Flamsteed's home for nearly four decades. In this time he prepared some of the most accurate star maps ever produced, mainly using a transit telescope exactly mounted on the first ‘Greenwich meridian’ (north-south line) in a small brick shed at the bottom of the garden.
The Observatory is an organic structure. Unlike Wren's other projects, which present a unity of concept and execution that precludes any need for alteration, it was a working laboratory and his buildings have undergone constant change and enlargement, incorporating new technology as and when it became available.
The Great Equatorial Building was added to the Observatory in 1857, originally with an opening onion-shaped dome containing a 28-inch refracting telescope that saw service from 1893 to the 1960s. Still the seventh largest such telescope in the world, it was restored to the Observatory in 1975 and is now used for educational purposes. The current dome is a fibreglass replica of the original, dismantled after being seriously damaged by a V1 flying bomb during WW2.
England’s naval and merchant supremacy at sea, and the discoveries of its scientists placed Greenwich at the centre of the world; the Observatory is located at zero degrees longitude, thanks to Greenwich meridian (as finally fixed by the Airy Transit Circle in 1851, slightly east of three earlier ones) being confirmed as Prime Meridian of the world at an international conference in 1884. As a result, world time is based on Greenwich Mean Time: each day on earth begins right here. This crucial piece of geographical information is marked by both a physical line in the ground, on the axis of the Airy Transit Circle, and more recently by laser beam, which shines out northward from the Observatory at night.
The modern era
National Maritime Museum
The modern era has seen many changes to both the former Greenwich Hospital/Naval College buildings and the Observatory, with additions that enhance the original structures and bring new life and new visitors to the spaces. After conversion work and major renovation of the Queen’s House, the National Maritime Museum opened in the former Hospital School buildings in 1937.
The East Wing only came into public use in 1951 and there were major redevelopments in both the 1970s and from the later 1980s onward. These culminated in the Neptune Court project, completed in 1999, in which the Building Design Partnership and Rick Mather Architects reconfigured the main galleries around the new Neptune Court, creating a glazed internal courtyard between the 1807 west central wing by Daniel Asher Alexander, and the south and west ranges of 1862 by Philip Hardwick. The Alexander wing still holds the original 1930s Caird Library (at 100,000 volumes the largest maritime reference library in the world), whose entrance is a rotunda in memory of Sir James Caird, the Museum’s founding benefactor (1864–1954), designed in austere inter-war classic style by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The Peter Harrison Planetarium
Integration of the old with the new continues at the Royal Observatory, where Allies and Morrison recently completed the Peter Harrison Planetarium, a 120-seat auditorium set within a bronze-clad cone, as well as the comprehensive restoration of the South Building, originally completed in 1899 as an astrophysics observatory, originally containing the Thompson Equatorial telescope.
Greenwich modern architecture guide
Greenwich is home to some of London's most adventurous new architectural projects, including the O2 Arena, Laban Centre, Millennium Village and Peter Harrison Planetarium. Find out more in our Greenwich modern architecture guide.
Maritime Greenwich, present and future
Greenwich presents a varied and exhilarating architectural landscape. Its expansive classical façades have provided backdrops to countless films: they were recently digitally enhanced with speculative architectural additions for the fantasy film The Golden Compass.
Greenwich also continues to play an important part in the cultural life of the city. The National Maritime Museum and Greenwich Park will be the equestrian events venue for the 2012 Olympics. The ongoing restoration of the Cutty Sark, due for completion by 2010, will re-create yet another cultural destination, cementing Greenwich’s place at the heart of London’s maritime, scientific, social and architectural history.
Jonathan Bell, December 2007
Amended Pieter van de Merwe, January 2008