Started off with tea and cakes in Greenwich High Street which were good. My cake being a sort of posh flapjack involving almonds and dates as well as the more traditional ingredients.
Onto the Maritime Museum where a lot of work had been done in the fairly recent past, with courtyards glassed over in the way of the British Museum and some handsome extensions. Not too sure about this fashion for glassing over museum courtyards, but I suppose it does increase the amount of space available in a useful way. Lots more space for shops and restaurants. I was a bit disappointed with the Nelson exhibition, although there was a fine model of one of his battleships, a model which has left me a bit muddled up about which sails of square riggers have yards to control their lower edges as well as yards to which to fix their upper edges. Perhaps it all depends on the type of ship (see Cutty Sark later on).
However, the museum more than made up for this disappointment with its exhibition of Turner paintings, taking us through his prolific & profitable career, spanning, more or less, the first half of the nineteenth century, the golden age of sail. His stuff was interspersed with that of his contemporaries and included, inter alia, a Constable, a Gainsborough and a Bonington. I was much taken with this last, a view of a beach in Normandy somewhere near the mouth of the Somme. As far as Turner was concerned, I think I like his middle period the best, where he has moved away from pictures of seas, ships and shipping towards something more abstract, mainly watery, but not so far that there is no conventional content. The picture called 'The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838' is justly both popular and famous.
An adequate lunch in a handsome new cafeteria, looking out over the park, then off to take a quick look at the town before catching the train home. First we came across a hotel which had recently been inspected by the hotel inspector, so I hope no one thinks that I have become a hotel inspector tourist. For the record, I do not even watch the programme, except perhaps a snippet when it precedes Agatha on ITV3. Next came a walk around the new version of the Cutty Sark, also featuring a glassing over, this one over the dock in which the ship now lives, so that you walk around the outside of the bottom of the ship in the warm. The overall effect was of the Cutty Sark sitting on a huge, inflatable, see-through cushion. I was not convinced, and I gather from the letters' page in today's DT that there are mixed views on the subject.
Lastly we took a look inside the church, an impressive example of English Baroque dedicated to St. Alfege, an Archbishop of Canterbury who fell victim to the vikings around 1000AD, having withheld his consent to being ransomed on the grounds that he did not want to burden his flock. One wonders how many of his successors would have been, or would be, so considerate. One of the notable features of the interior of the church was the cunning painting around the altar, simulating elaborate stone and wood work, presumably from the same stable as that in the neighbouring banqueting hall. Or, that in Ham House near us at Epsom. Only slightly marred by a rude and offensive young man complaining about his handout from the the food bank there.
We had run out of puff by the time we got back to the second hand bookshop outside the station, so that will have to wait for our next visit, probably soon, not having realised before what an interesting place Greenwich is.
PS: for collectors of odd facts, I offer the following two. One, a cutty sark is the name of the very short nightie in which erring females were dressed when they were exhibited in church in Scotland. The preacher preached, the female portion of the congregation tutted and the male portion gawped. All very edifying. Two, H. M. Tomlinson, an author from the 1930's of whom I am fond, records coming across a rather grubby Cutty Sark in the Surrey Commercial Docks, rebadged as the Portuguese barquentine 'Ferriera'. Her day as a clipper was done, but she had not then made it to the land of heritage, this being some time before 1920.
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