place

Macartney House

1694 establishments in EnglandGrade II listed buildings in the Royal Borough of GreenwichGrade II listed houses in LondonHouses completed in 1694
Macartney House, Greenwich (01)
Macartney House, Greenwich (01)

Macartney House is a Grade II listed house in Chesterfield Walk, Greenwich, London. The house was built around 1694 although has since had a number of extra additions and extensions. Among them are some added by Sir John Soane who also remodelled the interior in 1802 under the ownership of George Lyttelton. The north wing was added around 1855 and a few further extensions were added in the following decades. The building was split into flats in 1925. There is a blue plaque commemorating General James Wolfe, who died leading the British to victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. He was taken to lie in state here after his death. A statue of him was given by the people of Canada and stands nearby in Greenwich Park.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Macartney House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Macartney House
Chesterfield Walk, Greater London

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: Macartney HouseContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.4749 ° E -0.0032 °
placeShow on map

Address

General James Wolfe

Chesterfield Walk
SE10 8QX Greater London (Royal Borough of Greenwich)
England, United Kingdom
mapOpen on Google Maps

Macartney House, Greenwich (01)
Macartney House, Greenwich (01)
Share experience

Nearby Places

Prime meridian (Greenwich)
Prime meridian (Greenwich)

The historic prime meridian or Greenwich meridian is a geographical reference line that passes through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London, England. The modern IERS Reference Meridian widely used today is based on the Greenwich meridian, but differs slightly from it. The prime meridian was first established by Sir George Airy in 1851, and by 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it as the reference meridian on their charts and maps. In October of that year, at the behest of US President Chester A. Arthur, 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington, D.C., United States, for the International Meridian Conference. This conference selected the meridian passing through Greenwich as the official prime meridian due to its popularity. However, France abstained from the vote, and French maps continued to use the Paris meridian for several decades. In the 18th century, London lexicographer Malachy Postlethwayt published his African maps showing the "Meridian of London" intersecting the Equator a few degrees west of the later meridian and Accra, Ghana. The plane of the prime meridian is parallel to the local gravity vector at the Airy transit circle (51°28′40.1″N 0°0′5.3″W) of the Greenwich observatory. The prime meridian was therefore long symbolised by a brass strip in the courtyard, now replaced by stainless steel, and since 16 December 1999, it has been marked by a powerful green laser shining north across the London night sky. Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers show that the marking strip for the prime meridian at Greenwich is not exactly at zero degrees, zero minutes, and zero seconds but at approximately 5.3 seconds of arc to the west of the meridian (meaning that the meridian appears to be 102.478 metres east). In the past, this offset has been attributed to the establishment of reference meridians for space-based location systems such as WGS 84 (which GPS relies on) or that errors gradually crept into the International Time Bureau timekeeping process. The actual reason for the discrepancy is that the difference between precise GNSS coordinates and astronomically determined coordinates everywhere remains a localized gravity effect due to vertical deflection; thus, no systematic rotation of global longitudes occurred between the former astronomical system and the current geodetic system.

Crooms Hill
Crooms Hill

Crooms Hill is a residential street in Greenwich in South East London. The street name has been described as one of the oldest in London, possibly deriving from the Celtic word 'crom', meaning crooked.It runs uphill in a southerly direction for approximately 1 km (0.6 mi) from central Greenwich along the east side of Greenwich Park to Blackheath where it splits into Cade Road and General Wolfe Road, while Chesterfield Walk branches off towards the Ranger's House. The southern end was formerly called Heathgate Lane, possibly signifying the location of a gate onto the Heath.At the northern end are Greenwich Theatre and the adjacent Rose and Crown pub at a crossroads that links eastwards to King William Walk (via Nevada Street), northwards to Greenwich High Road (via Stockwell Street) and westwards to Royal Hill (via Burney Street). It is a largely residential street; near central Greenwich, it consists primarily of terraced townhouses; further south are larger individual houses. At the northern end of the road are blue plaques on the former residences of Cecil Day-Lewis and Benjamin Waugh, and the Fan Museum. This end of the street was served by Greenwich Park railway station in nearby Stockwell Street from 1888 to 1917. The Pevsner Guide describes Crooms Hill as "the pride of domestic architecture in Greenwich". Much of the housing dates from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Although some Tudor era buildings survive much of the land was developed when Greenwich Park was enclosed in 1619 leaving the road outside the walls. Many of the new residences were built by wealthy merchants and others from the City of London as second homes. About 0.7 km (0.4 mi) south of Greenwich town centre is the Catholic Our Ladye Star of the Sea, a Gothic Revival church designed by William Wardell in the 1840s.

Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Royal Observatory, Greenwich

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG; known as the Old Royal Observatory from 1957 to 1998, when the working Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO, temporarily moved south from Greenwich to Herstmonceux) is an observatory situated on a hill in Greenwich Park in south east London, overlooking the River Thames to the north. It played a major role in the history of astronomy and navigation, and because the Prime Meridian passes through it, it gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the precursor to today's Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The ROG has the IAU observatory code of 000, the first in the list. ROG, the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House and the clipper ship Cutty Sark are collectively designated Royal Museums Greenwich.The observatory was commissioned in 1675 by King Charles II, with the foundation stone being laid on 10 August. The site was chosen by Sir Christopher Wren, a former Savilian Professor of Astronomy; as Greenwich Park was a royal estate, no new land needed to be bought. At that time the king also created the position of Astronomer Royal, to serve as the director of the observatory and to "apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation." He appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. The building was completed in the summer of 1676. The building was often called "Flamsteed House", in reference to its first occupant. The scientific work of the observatory was relocated elsewhere in stages in the first half of the 20th century, and the Greenwich site is now maintained almost exclusively as a museum, although the AMAT telescope became operational for astronomical research in 2018.