National Maritime Museum & Much More – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

After visiting the Greenwich Royal Observatory in the morning, I stayed in Greenwich, England, for the afternoon. Then, I visited the National Maritime Museum, the Queen’s House, the Painted Hall, and the Cutty Sark.

WARNING: Because I got a late start this morning and it took a little over an hour each way to get between my hotel and Greenwich, and I did a lot this afternoon, I’m now quite tired. That will likely be reflected in the extreme brevity, sloppiness, and typos of this post. Even more so than is normally the case in these pages. Sorry about that.

National Maritime Museum

The National Maritime Museum is a short walk from the Royal Observatory. It’s on the edge of Greenwich Park, which contains the observatory.

The museum is a fair size with a lot of displays on, not surprisingly, maritime topics. The National Maritime Museum presents information on maritime battles, trade, and important ships and types of ships.

The business of the East India Company and its trade of, initially, tea and later cotton, wool, and other textiles gets a lot of focus, along with the company’s tendencies toward exploitation at times. There are also information panels on some of the leading lights of the East India Company.

There was one display in the National Maritime Museum on some types of commerce that are or were conducted via the sea. You’d be surprised to learn that fishing was one of them. Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that.

There was one room that focused on polar areas, both the Arctic and Antarctica. In the Antarctica section of this room, one of the displays featured Percy. Percy was a stuffed Emperor Penguin that was caught on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s first expedition to Antarctica, between 1901 and 1904. Percy is cute. And very dead.

In addition to static text panels, the National Maritime Museum provided interactive displays, models of ships, navigation equipment, and more.

The National Maritime Museum also has an old Royal barge from 1732 on display.

I don’t know if this is true, but it looks as if the National Maritime Museum is in a square building that used to have a large courtyard in the centre of it. That courtyard, if that’s what it was, is now covered. There’s a huge map of the oceans on the floor and a small cafe off to the side.

Because the exhibit space is three storeys tall (including the ground floor), the walls of this central area are quite high. On one, there’s a collection of large, colourful figures. They look important, but they’re just figureheads. Litterally. They’re ships’ figureheads dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.

In one small room, just in front of the washrooms, there’s a large display of stained glass. It used to reside over a staircase at the Baltic Exchange in the City of London.

I quite enjoyed the National Maritime Museum. There’s so much more to say about it. But tiredness and forgetfulness prevent me from doing so.

The Queen’s House

Paul, the guide at the Greenwich Royal Observatory that I visited this morning, mentioned the Queen’s House, which is clearly visible from the observatory’s hill. He said it was England’s first Renaissance-style building, but it didn’t arrive until the tail end of the Renaissance. Commissioned in 1619, it was designed to be a garden retreat for Anne of Denmark, the wife of King James I of England.

Today, the Queen’s House is an art gallery. It contains mainly maritime-related art, including maritime themes, and portraits of maritime personages. However, there are also some portraits of a few royals.

As regular readers and anyone who knows me know, I’m not a great lover of art, nor am I an art critic. So I won’t say anything more about it. The building’s nice, but I wasn’t crazy about the art. Then again, I rarely am. So, there’s that.

The Painted Hall, Etc.

The Painted Hall is in the Old Naval Academy, which now houses the University of Greenwich. There used to be a Royal Hospital there. The Painted Hall was intended as an as an eating space for the Greenwich Pensioners who lived at the Royal Hospital. The pensioners had been military people and were shown great respect.

I said in the preceding section that I’m not a great lover of art, but I was bowled over by the Painted Hall. It’s a large hall. And it’s painted. The painting was done in the early 18th century.

To be speific, the ceilings are vibrantly painted with amazing imagery. I said “ceiliings,” not “ceilng” because it has two sections. The lower hall is by far the larger one. The upper hall is only about a half dozen steps up and not separated from the lower hall by all that much more than the steps.

In the upper hall, there are also paintings on the back and side walls.

I won’t try to describe the paintings in words, because I’m not capable of that. Instead, I’ve included some pictures here.

The halls contain several deeply fluted pillars and relief sculptures. Except they don’t. They’re all very effective two-dimensional trompe l’oeils. I probably would have left thinking they were real had the free audio guide I received with the admission price not told me about them.

The Painted Hall had been closed for two years while they did some restoration and cleaning work. It reopened in 2019, which is recent enough that the paintings are still very vibrant after their cleaning.

The admission ticket to the Painted Hall also includes admission to the skittles alley. Skittles was a forerunner to the ten-pin bowling of today. The skittles alley has two lanes that looked about the same length of a modern bowling alley lane. The balls were practice cannon balls made from the hardwood. The skittles, which look like modern bowling pins, were made from “belaying pins’ used to secure ropes on sailing ships. The alley lanes were originally made from decking planks from ships docked at nearby Deptford.

Between the two lanes, there was a slightly sloped ball return gutter.

Visitors could try their hand at skittles. I didn’t because I didn’t want to wait for the people already trying it.

There is also a chapel in the complex that’s open to the public even without buying a ticket to the Painted Hall. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the chapel.

Cutty Sark

The Cutty Sark is one of the last remaining tea clippers. I say “remaining” which is not to say it can still sail, only that it’s mostly intact. It sits in its drydock and will never leave. The area between the drydock and the River Thames has been filled in and topped with a promenade.

And the ship has been raised over three metres off the floor of the drydock. It’s held up by a series of angled poles attached to both sides of the hull and the walls of the drydock. A sign says they did this to take the weight of the hull and, therefore, preserve its shape. I wonder what the supporting poles do to that shape.

For a fee, I was able to wander around all of the decks of the Cutty Sark, including the top deck. There were was a short interactive video and displays about the ship and the cargoes it carried.

I was also able to go down to the floor of the drydock and look at the Cutty Sark from underneath it. Lined up against the back wall of the drydock, there was a collection of figureheads arranged to look like it was a large audience watching the ship.

I enjoyed the afternoon and probably would have said a lot more if I weren’t so tired. But I am so tired. Hence, I’ll wrap this up now.

Programming Note

I’m scheduled to fly back home tomorrow. However, my flight isn’t until 3:50 in the afternoon, so I’ll have a little time in the morning. I don’t know if I’ll do much then, or if I do, whether it will be anything to write home about. But I will write a post tomorrow, probably at the airport or on the plane to be posted when I land.

At a minimum, it will include summaries of my time in London and of this trip as a whole.