Thursday 20 May 2010

Out of time, out of place


This bus was driving through Greenwich on Sunday - only a few miles out and a few decades late!

I was in the town centre to visit the recently-opened Discover Greenwich, a new visitor centre/museum in the Old Royal Naval College. A particularly nice theme is the focus upon craftspeople involved in the building of Greenwich. It's illustrated by some impressive pieces of stone-carving and artificial Coade stone as well as by tools, materials and so on. I learned something new about the Coade factory, too: they employed children to push the paste into moulds, as their smaller fingers could reach into the areas of finer detail.

There were plenty of other aspects of Greenwich history to explore too, from the royal palace to the 'cabins' of Naval Hospital residents. Some exhibits seemed to prize multimedia and interactivity over actual clarity, but on the whole the centre is worth a visit.


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