It was late afternoon on Monday as I stood on the Greenwich Mean Time prime meridian line in the verdant patch of London that gives it its name. I surveyed the park bathed in golden sunlight below and, across the river Thames, the financial district of Canary Wharf, its towers sticking up like black fingers on the horizon.
A staccato of Italian accents snapped me out of my little moment of pensive indulgence. “Mister! Over here!” Over where? Then I saw one of them. His shaven pate and eyes, and his waving hand, bobbed up at the point where the meridian line dropped off over a wall to a path below.
I walked to the edge of the drop-off point and peered over. A symphony of smiling faces greeted me from beneath: maybe a dozen Italian tourists, all aged in their late 20s. They had arrived at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory too late for last entry, and now were locked out of the courtyard where the official line was laid out in stainless steel.
“Will you do for us a picture? Of the line, of the line. A photograph please.” In London, locals know to keep their smartphones hidden lest they be swiped by thieves. These Italians hadn’t got the memo; Bald Guy gamely proffered up his iPhone to me, a stranger, from the path below.
‘The scene was like the end of the world’: Thailand reels from earthquake
Banal and chilling: It took about 40 seconds for US immigration officers to lift Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk off streets
Trump proves topical at tropical gathering on Chinese island
Literary portrait of Spanish child murderer prompts freedom of speech debate
I stretched my arm through the fence but couldn’t reach. Quick as you like, the men in the Italian group formed a huddle behind the guy with the phone and hoisted him in the air, like Federico Ruzza for the Azzurri at a Six Nations lineout. That was how he had spotted me in the first place, his head bobbing above the wall as his mates lifted him off the ground to glimpse the meridian line.
I took his phone and, smiling to myself, acceded to his enthusiastic out-of-sight demands. It was like taking directions from the ghost of Bernardo Bertolucci: “One picture that way on the line, please. Then the other side. Now the landscape. Now portrait ...” Italians love London. The feeling is mutual.
London is a magnet for tourists. Greenwich is a magnet within it, due to its association with GMT, the world benchmark for time-zones. It was on my mind with the clocks due to change this weekend.
The borough town is still proudly working class to the east, but to the west, with its ancient links to royalty and imperial Britain, it is pretty and very prosperous. The Royal Observatory was built on a park hill overlooking an old royal palace by King Charles II in the late 17th century, as a workplace and home for the first official astronomer royal, John Flamsteed.
Part of his job was to develop standards for time and navigation. That became important for an imperial nation, whose ships took to the high seas to conquer foreign lands for the British empire. The second astronomer royal was Edmond Halley, of comet fame.
The incumbent, the 15th holder of the title, is Martin John Rees, the Baron Rees of Ludlow, a cross-bench peer and former Cambridge academic known for his work on gamma rays and black holes. The seventh astronomer royal, George Airy, was perhaps the most impactful.
[ Gamma rays could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions here on earthOpens in new window ]
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, sea navigation was a challenge. Mariners had an accurate system based on the equator to determine latitude (north or south). Measuring longitude (east or west) was harder. Airy developed an accepted prime meridian line from the observatory at Greenwich, which became zero degrees longitude. It became a global benchmark for time zones, with each 15 degrees from the line representing a new hour relative to GMT.
[ The Irish Times view on changing the clocks: only a matter of timeOpens in new window ]
Tourists now flock to Greenwich to view the museum and observatory, high on the hill, and to take selfies on the line that is the putative border between the mapped globe’s east and west. Few seem to care that the zero degree longitude line used on global positioning systems (GPS) is actually about 100m to the east of Airy’s GMT line, based on modern knowledge of Earth’s wonky shape.
GMT is also no longer a global standard used for timekeeping, replaced by UTC (co-ordinated universal time), which is only marginally different from GMT and, often, the two are used interchangeably. GMT is still a basis for hourly time-zones.
The imperial nations of Britain and France were rivals in setting standards for time and navigation. This point is hammered home by the huge statue on top of the hill at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory. Gen James Wolfe, who defeated the French at Quebec to secure Canada for the British empire, has one of the best views of London, along with the tourists who gather at his feet.
Afterwards, I heard the Italians again. They had come up from the lower path to hand the iPhone through a gate to another tourist, this time an attractive woman who might have been a South American, to take more photographs for them of the meridian line. The Italians cooed at her through the gate. Then they waved at me. We all smiled. The sun was getting low and it was time to leave.
