Greenwich - a sense of place
How do we relate to our local area?
Where we come from, where we live and who we love: there’s no escaping the importance of place and identity in the 21st century. It matters how we talk about them and how we feel about them and its very important to explore such questions in considering our own relationship to the places in which we live, play, go to school, go to work, raise our families and shape our memories.
The establishment of an early settlement and the foundation by the Romans of the city which became London, owes much to use of the River Thames as a highway. The ‘ox-bow’ form of the Thames provides a natural approach to Greenwich from both up and down stream. Indeed it is Greenwich's relationship to the river which as bestowed a unique sense of place which is, in part, indelibly etched into its historic landscape. In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. The great buildings have always been designed to be seen primarily from the river. They have provided a magnificent spectacle throughout the passing of time, and make a statement of royal and military power from the 15th Century. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1997, the importance of Maritime Greenwich lies in its royal origins, especially under the British Tudor and Stuart dynasties, and its development from the 17th century onwards as a site of astronomical research related to navigation, and of Royal Naval welfare and education. In a Royal Park setting, its ensemble of buildings including the Queen’s House, the Royal Observatory and the Royal Hospital for Seamen (today the Old Royal Naval College), symbolise English artistic and scientific endeavour in the 17th and 18th centuries, epitomising the work of architects Inigo Jones (1573–1652), Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and the landscape designer André Le Nôtre (1613–1700). All but the Tudor Palace of Placentia can be witnessed by visitors to this place and are explored in the Greenwich visitors centre. However, there are elements of Greenwich's riverside story that have been arguably even more influential, but rather less enduring, so that residents today barely witness these less travelled narratives. Indeed, the World Heritage Site needs to be understood in relationship to its two near but less frequented neighbours at Deptford and Woolwich. Here developments in the 19th and 20th centuries have largely concealed what these places once were, but their stories are intimately connected to Greenwich's sense of place. It was in Deptford and Woolwich that Henry VIII established Royal dockyards in 1514 which lasted until 1869, 355 years. It was in Woolwich where the same Tudor monarch established the Royal Arsenal in 1518 to supply the Navy and Army with armaments. This developed into a vast military complex that was only dismantled by 1967, 450 years. Inevitaby the connections that these institutions had with the rise and fall of British global power reveal both the achievements and more troublesome legacies in Greenwich's sense of place, as an important site for Empire building, connected as it is to the Thames estuary, and from their the world.
Although the Dockyards and the Arsenal have largely disappeared from our historic landscape (whilst the World Heritage Site at Greenwich remains), the sense of place of the contemporary Royal Borough of Greenwich in 2023 as been hugely impacted upon by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and post millenium substantial regeneration and developments of the 19th-21st Centuries. The Royal Borough of Greenwich has experienced an unprecedented programme of renewal and regeneration over the past 30 years,. This spread of suburban London contains the plethora of smaller more distinctive Greenwich communities like Blackheath, Kidbrooke, Charlton, Eltham, Shooter Hill, Plumstead, Thamesmead and Lee. These are the places which our students and their families inhabit today, amidst the Victorian to contemporary housing and flats. They too reveal stories of lifestyle, migration, community and culture, What of their sense of place, nesteled as they are south and often in the shadow of the World Heritage Site at Greenwich? What is the perception of these families and our students towards Greenwich's sense of place and their relationship to it? The stories that this Greenwich historic landscape reveal invite both awe and wonder in the scientific, technological and artistic achievements. In contrast they also reveal the militarism associated with the rise and fall of Empire. How do these stories help us to understand Greenwich's sense of place today? To what extent as this identity changed over time? This is what we invite curriculum areas to consider this community day. The links to resources on this page are put together to inspire inquisitiveness and curiosity in exploring these themes, and the relationship that we as a school and community of curriculum areas have both to it and interpreting it with our students. |
World Heritage site - Greenwich
Deptford and Woolwich DockyardsThe Woolwich ArsenalGreenwich Today |