All Girl Guides and Girl Scouts have five homes around the world, the World Centres. We have one of them right here in London, Pax Lodge, and I spent the Thinking Day weekend there. Thinking Day is the most important day in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS)’s calendar – it’s our birthday and the day when we think about our ten million sisters in 150 countries. We usually do a district celebration event but as we didn’t this year (mostly because I didn’t step up and volunteer to arrange it all) I went to my local World Centre instead.
That was Saturday. Afterwards I returned to my Travelodge in Greenwich (and then went out to Soho to see comedian Laura Lexx, who was brilliant). On Sunday I got up ready to go out and do one of Pax Lodge’s Challenges Around London. They do a few. They do London adventures which is a guided activity day but they also sell self-guided challenge packs for which you receive a badge. I’ve already done the Harry Potter challenge with my Rangers and this weekend I opted for the Turn Back Time challenge, which comes with a different badge and is also based firmly in Greenwich, where I happened to be staying.
First stop… well, that was at the Gate Clock pub by the Cutty Sark for breakfast while I looked through the challenge booklet. I was going to see the clock for which the pub is named so it seemed eminently appropriate to stop there for toast and apple juice before heading out what turned out to be a 9+km walk.
The first official stop was at Island Gardens. I was going to walk through the Thames foot tunnel. I’d looked up some facts about it over breakfast. It’s 370m long and 15m deep, it was completed sand opened in 1902 and a section near the north end was damaged in WWII and the repairs have significantly reduced the 9ft diameter in that section.
It was a foggy morning. I couldn’t see the glass-domed exit at the Greenwich end of the tunnel, just 370m away. I could barely even see the Thames.
I’d deliberately not looked at the number of steps while doing my research because that was the first question. 87 steps, that’s how many. And then 98 back up the other side, which is more. Too many. I would have liked to take the lift because 98 spiral steps is a lot but I had to count them and also the lift was clogged with bikes – which you shouldn’t ride through the tunnel, cyclists.
The other tunnel tasks were to take a group photo spelling out the word Thames with our bodies – but I’m just one body so I settled for a selfie. A bad selfie because I didn’t want it to be too obvious to all the other people. The tunnel was a lot busier on a foggy Sunday morning than I’d expected. I also opted not to practise projecting my voice by yelling and seeing how long it echoed for. I’m not the yelling kind and while a group of Guides yelling might be merely annoying, a single person yelling looks absolutely insane.
Next was Greenwich Market. My questions here were to find “the most ecological item or food for a snack”, draw an interesting antique and find the man who sells his own funky maps of London. There’s plenty to eat in there, all hipster and artisan but finding the most eco one – well, the vegan soya-free chocolate was a good candidate but I opted for the quinea salad. To write down, not to eat. I’d only just had breakfast. The antiques weren’t very interesting but I found three separate stalls selling repurposed lighting and one of them had a spectacular thing in the middle, a cabinet covered in knobs and wheels, with glass bowls on top and horn-shaped tubes snaking from the top. My drawing doesn’t do it justice. I didn’t find the man with the maps but I found a lot of interesting jewellery and a lot of very interesting art and after all, I don’t know how old the challenge is and whether the map man has moved on.
I moved on. Next was the Old Royal Naval College, which is free to the public, it turns out. I’ve wandered through its grounds a few times. I ran up there to watch the filming of the climactic scenes from Thor: The Dark World. But I’ve never been inside.
I don’t know what the visitor centre building was designed for. I thought maybe it was on the site of the ruins of the old Greenwich Palace, one of Henry VIII’s palaces – and in fact his birthplace, as well as Elizabeth I and Mary I – but there’s nothing of that building left, not above ground. I found the replica Tudor jousting helmet but it was a bit big to put on without a second pair of hands to help. I did put on the matching gauntlet. Later research says the visitor centre was the Pepys Building, which used to be a naval engineering workshop and housed the squash courts from the naval college days.
Next question: the Painted Hall. The task here was to spot the secret door to the roof but the Painted Hall is closed for renovations until March 2019 so that was a write-off. However, the Chapel was open. It was Sunday morning so there was a service going on, which meant I couldn’t roam at will and I couldn’t take photos but I stood at the back and stared up at the ceiling and the walls in search of sea creatures – couldn’t see any at all – and then stopped my search to listen to the choir. I didn’t know church choirs like that still existed outside of royal weddings. They were spectacular. If you’re in Greenwich on a Sunday morning, do pop in and listen to them.
From the Old Royal Naval College, I crossed the road and went into the National Maritime Museum. I’ve never been inside but I’ve been to the Greenwich Comedy Festival a few times, held in a marquee in its front garden. I think the place used to be built around a large courtyard. There’s now a glass roof on it and a lot of the middle is kid-friendly – the first floor is entirely occupied by a giant map with lots of push-along boats on it, there are play-boats downstairs, buggy-parks everywhere. In the actual building are the exhibits, mostly of the dimly-lit interesting-only-to-enthusiasts kind.
I went off and found Napoleon’s Trafalgar jacket. Why is it significant? That’ll be the bullet hole in the left shoulder, the one that killed him. Someone’s given it a very good wash since then, there’s not a trace of blood on it.
I was scuppered on the “try out the ship simulator” question because that’s out of service at the moment but I did take a photo of me standing in my country on the giant map. Actually, I’m standing in Ireland because that was the only way I could get me and the UK both in the same photo. And the last task, what is the Special Exhibit on right now? It’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year and it costs £10 to look at, although it’s free to wander around the little shop bit and look at postcards and books of the pictures.
Now it was Observatory time. I’ve never been because it’s such a long way up the hill but the challenge said to climb it and so I did. What’s the significance of the Gate Clock? Well, I’m not sure. It says on the plaque that it’s among the earliest electrically-driven clocks and I guess it’s the official time of GMT. It’s interesting in that it’s a 24-hour clock – the hour hand goes all the way around the clock just once in a whole day and so you have to stop and read it rather than glance at it as you would with a conventional analogue clockface. It’s a minute or two faster than my watch. There’s also a plaque of publicly-available standard measures on the gate – this is what an actual foot and an actual yard look like.
I watched the Time Ball drop at 1pm – a bit anti-climactic; it doesn’t drop, it just kind of moves downward.
I took a photo on the Prime Meridian – the advertised line is inside the courtyard, accessible only to people who pay for entry tickets but if you look along it, it dives off the edge of the courtyard and then crosses a lane below which is free access, if a bit more restricted in space.
The rest of the questions were answerable inside the Observatory and I didn’t go in. The other places had been free entry but this wasn’t. But I looked up the answers when I came home!
Why was Greenwich chosen as the location of the Prime Meridian Line? Well, basically because that was where John Flamsteed’s observatory was. He was the first Astronomer Royal and he came up with the formula for converting solar time to mean time, that is the yearly average of the time each day when the sun crosses the Prime Meridian.
What do you see if you look through Flamsteed’s telescope? I don’t know, he had a lot of telescopes and also a 7-foot equatorial sextant. The sky, probably. Maybe a comet – it’s said that he identified two comets as the same comet on different parts of its journey around the sun.
View the Camera Obscura – It shows a close-up moving panorama of Maritime Greenwich, all within a circular screen.
What is the longitude of Rio de Janeiro? -43.182365
Instead, I enjoyed the view over Greenwich and Canary Wharf – the morning fog had burned off and it was now blazing sunshine – and I stopped for my picnic not in the park, as the challenge suggested, but on the Gagarin terrace. I had paused in the park to play “guess which way is north” (guess: towards Greenwich town centre and the Docklands development) but I couldn’t see anything in that part of the park that would help me be any more precise.
With most of the challenge now finished, I turned to the last page. Have a ride on the Emirates Air Line, the cable car that joins North Greenwich to the other side of the Thames. I don’t imagine for a moment Pax Lodge meant for people doing this challenge to walk from the Observatory to the o2 Arena but I needed a few more February miles under my feet and it was a nice day and my phone said it was only about two miles. So off I went.
It’s not a particularly inspiring walk. Walk down the hill, follow the main road, walk through an area that rapidly transforms from residential to pretty industrial and then you’re on the far-reaching expanse of the o2 territory. The car parks stretch back at least a third of the total distance. I reached the cable car. I’ve been on it a few times before so when I saw the queue – the sunny Sunday in half-term queue – I decided the challenge would be complete with a few photos of myself there and a naming of three buildings on the horizon and then I’d take my preferred way of crossing the Thames – get on the Clipper and fly down to Waterloo. Well, fly down to Tower Bridge and then crawl the rest of the way because of speed restrictions. So my three buildings are the o2 Arena, formerly known as the Millennium Dome, One Canada Square, better known as Canary Wharf and 8 Canada Square, better known as the HSBC Tower.
You used to have to take your finished challenges back to Pax Lodge to get the badge but now they give you both at once and trust you to complete the challenge, although their definition of “complete” is mostly just to use it as a guideline to explore London. Nonetheless, I think I completed it, despite the closures that prevented me from getting at the Painted Hall and the ship simulator and my own refusal to pay for the Observatory and queue for the cable car. I saw a lot of Greenwich I haven’t bothered with before, I found the origin of time and I think I earned my Challenges Through London badge.
