Greenwich Hospital and surroundings

Exiting Greenwich Park on the south-east side you walk into the beautiful but plain terraces of Park Vista, an aptly named street.

And reaching Thames side one comes across the Cutty Sark pub which, as it proudly states on the front, dates back to the late 18th century

This area is a little Georgian time capsule, and therefore by definition extremely aesthetically pleasing. Here is the old Harbour Masters Office.

This is Trinity Hospital, the oldest building in Central Greenwich although rebuilt to its current Gothic style in 1812.

Flooding and extreme weather conditions aren't new....

Time for lunch at the Trafalgar Tavern.

And then after refreshment I wandered around the Greenwich Hospital complex, after St Paul's Sir Christopher Wren's greatest work. It should be on every London visitor's list of sights to see in London, and certainly on a sunny Saturday it feels like it is. Midweek it is much quieter. The architecture suits tranquility.

The Painted Hall is reasonably claimed to be the finest dining hall in Europe, the height of British Baroque art. Designed by Wren and Hawksmoor, and then painted by Sir James Thornhill, so all the best of British. It apparently took Thornhill 19 years to paint this - quite a commission. He was paid £1 per square yard for the walls, and £3 per square yard for the ceiling. Bargain. Imaging how hard physically to paint a ceiling like that.

The man with the telescope depicted here is Galileo

The Chapel is stunning too.

In the centre here is Inigo Jones' The Queens House. The whole hospital complex had to be built around this - in order to maintain Queens Mary's view of the Thames. At its peak the hospital housed 2700 navy veterans.

National Maritime Museum

Queens House

The Observatory

There was a modern sculpture exhibition which I liked too, although I suspect these were all cast rather than actually sculpted.

This is the Greenwich Discovery Centre - a sort of glorified Tourist Information Centre with bits and bobs from the area illustrating the history of Greenwich

Church of St Alfege, possibly not the best known saint. He was archbishop of  Canterbury from 954 to 1012 when he met a grizzly end being bludgeoned to death by the Vikings. The church was first built in the 11th century when all this would have been a bit fresher in the mind, but was rebuilt by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the early 18th century.

This lovely house was the home of the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis as the plaque says, bur also the childhood home of his now rather better known actor son, Daniel Day Lewis.

Gloucester Circus

And finally, the Cutty Sark. This was a tea clipper, once the fastest ship in the wold, built in 1869 to be the first ship to bring back the new season of tea from China. It almost immediately became obsolete with the coming of steam ships.