Charlton
What to see
You’ll find accounts of local tourist attractions in Towns of Two Halves (and of 91 other places: order the book now for £8 from info@townsof2halves.co.uk). London’s tourist attractions are well covered in Visit London, Lonely Planet and Time Out. Links to places near Charlton are:
● Cutty Sark
● Fan Museum
● National Maritime Museum
● Old Royal Naval College
● Queen’s House
● Royal Observatory
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “Exhaustive research has failed to determine whether former poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who lived in Greenwich, walked east to Charlton Athletic or west to Millwall to enjoy top-class professional football.”
● “Henry VIII had used [Greenwich Castle] as a hunting lodge. According to Wikipedia he also found it convenient “to house his mistresses” there, as though in a harem. Convenient, perhaps, but hardly discreet: Henry VIII housed his wives in Greenwich Palace, at the foot of the hill.”
● “What about the meridian, you ask? What about it? Who talks about the western and eastern hemispheres? Who puts on a quaint ritual involving Neptune and ducking to mark a first crossing of the meridian? Nobody. It’s there if you want to look at it or take a selfie standing astride it, but you’ll probably get more out of the burlesque feathers in the Fan Museum.”
These are taken from the 2019-updated Charlton chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.
