Eltham

The Royal Borough of Greenwich ( (listen), , or ) is a London borough in southeast Greater London. The London Borough of Greenwich was formed in 1965 by the London Government Act 1963. The new borough covered the former area of the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich and part of the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich to the east. The local council is Greenwich London Borough Council which meets in Woolwich Town Hall. The council's offices are also based in Woolwich, the main urban centre in the borough. Greenwich is the location of the Greenwich prime meridian, on which all Coordinated Universal Time is based. The prime meridian running through Greenwich and the Greenwich Observatory is where the designation Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT began, and on which all world times are based. In 2012, Greenwich was listed as a top ten global destination by Frommer's – the only UK destination to be listed. To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II, Greenwich became a Royal Borough on 3 February 2012, due in part to its historic links with the Royal Family, and to its UNESCO World Heritage Site status as home of the Prime Meridian.

The Bob Hope Theatre is a community theatre in Eltham in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, England. The theatre is owned and run by the members of Eltham Little Theatre Company. The theatre's own repertory members present approximately 11 shows each year, including a pantomime every January, and an annual musical. A variety of other companies also perform at the theatre throughout the year – about 15 additional productions.

Eltham railway station is in the Well Hall area of Eltham, South East London, within the Royal Borough of Greenwich. It is 10 miles 68 chains (17.5 km) measured from London Victoria. It is in Travelcard Zone 4. The station is operated by Southeastern. The station has two platforms: platform 1 for services to Central London and platform 2 for Dartford and Barnehurst.

The Eltham Well Hall rail crash was an accident on the British railway system that occurred on 11 June 1972 at approximately 21:35. An excursion train from Margate to Kentish Town derailed on a sharp curve at Eltham Well Hall station, Eltham, London. The curve had a maximum permitted speed to be taken at 20 miles per hour (32 km/h) but the train was estimated to have been travelling at 65 miles per hour (105 km/h) resulting in the locomotive and all but one of the ten carriages derailing. The driver Robert Wilsdon and five passengers were killed, and 126 people were injured. At the subsequent public inquiry it was revealed that Wilsdon had been intoxicated by alcohol.

Eltham Palace is a large house at Eltham () in southeast London, England, within the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The house consists of the medieval great hall of a former royal residence, to which an Art Deco extension was added in the 1930s. The hammerbeam roof of the great hall is the third-largest of its type in England, and the Art Deco interior of the house has been described as a "masterpiece of modern design". The house is owned by the Crown Estate and managed by English Heritage, which took over responsibility for the great hall in 1984 and the rest of the site in 1995.

Eltham Hill School is a secondary school for girls and a mixed sixth form located in the Eltham area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich in London, England. It is a community school controlled by Greenwich London Borough Council.

The Tudor Barn is a large brick barn in Eltham in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. It was built in 1525 by William Roper. The Ropers lived next door in a manor house in the centre of a moat for several years. William married Margaret More, the daughter of Thomas More, and one of the most learned women of sixteenth-century England. It is a Grade II* listed building (as Well Hall Art Gallery).The west end of the Tudor Barn was mostly occupied by servants, as can be seen by the two huge chimneys there. However, the barn was also used for storage. It can be seen on old maps that the moat was directly connected to the Tudor Barn by a bridge.Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children and co-founder of the Fabian Society, lived in a house in the grounds of the Tudor Barn from 1899 to 1921.The Tudor Barn was refurbished in the 1930s. The Woolwich Borough Council then decided that they would use the newly renovated barn as the centrepiece of a new park, which is known as Well Hall Pleasaunce. The park opened in 1933, and three years later an art gallery was opened on the ground floor of the barn. This was not the council's original intention, however; they wanted a library and museum in the Tudor Barn, but these never materialised. For years after the Second World War, the barn contained the art gallery, a restaurant and a room for weddings and events in the upstairs space.

Well Hall is a place to the north of Eltham in the Royal Borough of Greenwich in southeast London, England, with no present formal boundaries and located 13.5 km (8.4 mi) east-southeast of Charing Cross. In the past Well Hall was the grounds of a manor house, and then a hamlet. Today it is a largely residential suburb and housing estate absorbed by the development of Eltham and London. It is centred on the main road between Eltham and Woolwich, on which many shops and businesses are located. Several major A roads including the South Circular Road and A2 road pass through the area, as does a railway line, serving Eltham station which is located in Well Hall. The Postcode that covers Well Hall and most of the Eltham area is SE9, and the 020 dialing covers the entire Royal Borough of Greenwich. Well Hall is split across two electoral wards, Eltham West on the west side of Well Hall Road, and Eltham North on the east side of Well Hall Road. In 2015 the population of these two wards combined was recorded as 24,621, although the wards cover a larger area than just Well Hall.

Blackheath Football Club is a rugby union club based in Well Hall, Eltham in south-east London. The club was founded in 1858, it is also the fourth-oldest rugby club in continuous existence in the world, after Dublin University Football Club (1854), Liverpool St Helens F.C. (1857) and Edinburgh Academical Football Club (1857). The Blackheath club also assisted in organising the world's first rugby international (between England and Scotland in Edinburgh on 27 March 1871) and hosted the first international between England and Wales ten years later – the players meeting and getting changed at the Princess of Wales public house. Blackheath, along with Civil Service F.C., is one of the two clubs that can claim to be a founder member of both The Football Association and the Rugby Football Union. The club currently play in National League 1, the third tier of the English rugby union system, with matches played at Well Hall, after a move from Rectory Field in Blackheath at the end of the 2015–16 season.

The Coronet Cinema on Well Hall Road, by Well Hall Roundabout in Well Hall, Eltham, London, is a grade II listed building with Historic England in the streamline moderne style. It was designed by Andrew Mather and Horace Ward for Odeon Theatres and opened in 1936. In 1981 it became the Coronet Cinema but closed in 2000. The building became derelict and remained unused for over a decade, it was eventually converted and extended into 53 flats and a parade of shops including a Tesco Express, and a gym and fitness centre, but the main front of the building remains intact.

St Thomas More Catholic School is a mixed Roman Catholic secondary school, located in the Eltham area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich in London, England.The school was first established in 1964, and is supported by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark. Previously a voluntary aided school administered by Greenwich London Borough Council, St Thomas More Catholic School converted to academy status in February 2015. However the school continues to coordinate with Greenwich London Borough Council for admissions. St Thomas More Catholic School offers GCSEs, BTECs and NVQs as programmes of study for pupils. Some courses are delivered in partnership with other schools in Greenwich.

Stephen Lawrence (13 September 1974 – 22 April 1993) was a black British teenager from Plumstead, southeast London, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in Well Hall Road, Eltham on the evening of 22 April 1993, when he was 18 years old. The case became a cause célèbre: its fallout included cultural changes of attitudes on racism and the police, and to the law and police practice. It also led to the partial revocation of the rule against double jeopardy. Two of the perpetrators were convicted of murder on 3 January 2012.After the initial investigation, five suspects were arrested but not charged. It was suggested during the investigation that Lawrence was killed because he was black, and that the handling of the case by the police and Crown Prosecution Service was affected by issues of race. A 1998 public inquiry, headed by Sir William Macpherson, examined the original Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) investigation and concluded that the investigation was incompetent and that the force was institutionally racist. It also recommended that the double jeopardy rule should be repealed in murder cases to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence: this was effected in 2005 upon enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The publication in 1999 of the resulting Macpherson Report has been called "one of the most important moments in the modern history of criminal justice in Britain". Jack Straw said that ordering the inquiry was the most important decision he made during his tenure as home secretary from 1997 to 2001. In 2010, the case was said to be "one of the highest-profile unsolved racially motivated murders".On 18 May 2011, after a further review, it was announced that two of the original suspects, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were to stand trial for the murder in the light of new evidence. At the same time it was disclosed that Dobson's original acquittal had been quashed by the Court of Appeal, allowing a retrial to take place. Such an appeal had only become possible following the 2005 change in the law, although Dobson was not the first person to be retried for murder as a result. On 3 January 2012, Dobson and Norris were found guilty of Lawrence's murder; the pair were juveniles at the time of the crime and were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty's pleasure, equivalent to a life sentence for an adult, with minimum terms of 15 years 2 months and 14 years 3 months respectively for what the judge described as a "terrible and evil crime".In the years after Dobson and Norris were sentenced, the case regained prominence when concerns of corrupt police conduct during the original case handling surfaced in the media. Such claims had surfaced before, and been investigated in 2007, but were reignited in 2013 when a former undercover police officer stated in an interview that, at the time, he had been pressured to find ways to "smear" and discredit the victim's family, in order to mute and deter public campaigning for better police responses to the case. Although further inquiries in 2012 by both Scotland Yard and the Independent Police Complaints Commission had ruled that there was no basis for further investigation, Home Secretary Theresa May ordered an independent inquiry by a prominent QC into undercover policing and corruption, which was described as "devastating" when published in 2014. An inquiry into whether members of the police force shielded the alleged killers was set up in October 2015.