Arriving at Greenwich ……. long before now ….

It will be over 65 years ago that I first caught sight of the Queen’s House at Greenwich.

The Queens House, 1979

We had been on an adventure out of Peckham, walked all the way to Blackheath and then by degree through Greenwich Park to that point where General Wolf and the Royal Observatory stand facing down views of the River and beyond.

Nothing quite prepared me, John Cox or Jimmy O’Donnell for that view or for that matter the expanse of grass, bushes and trees which we had just encountered.

Arriving at Greenwich, 1979

Its nearest equivalent was Peckham Rye and the park and they paled into insignificance.

And once we had moved to Eltham in the spring of 1964 , both Blackheath and Greenwich Park along with that stretch of the River became my playground.

A decade and a bit later I took one of only two river trips from Westminster.  Both were made on a whim and an expensive and a long way of getting home from Central London via the River and Greenwich, which in turn wasted a return railway ticket.  But such are whims that make for memories.

Of course since then and since I took the pictures much has changed, and the view from the summit down to the River and beyond is dramatically different.

Location; Greenwich

Pictures; a lost Greenwich, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson