The Meridian & A Slice of Reality

Somewhere along this stretch of path you cross the Greenwich Meridian, the line of zero longitude. Step one way and you are in the eastern hemisphere. Step the other way and you are in the western. The line carries on across the river and north through east London. The rusty slice of ship by the water sits almost exactly on it. It is an artwork by Richard Wilson called A Slice of Reality, made in 2000 from the Arco Trent, a sixty-metre sand dredger. Wilson kept a vertical section nine metres thick, about fifteen percent of the ship, and let the rest go for scrap. What remains is a cross-section of a working life at sea: the bridge, the cabins, the crew's quarters, even a pool table, all open to the wind. The ground under your feet has a story of its own. For almost a century this peninsula was covered by the East Greenwich Gas Works, which at its height spread over 240 acres and was the largest gasworks in Europe. It turned coal into the gas that lit and heated London, and left the soil so poisoned that it had to be cleaned up before anything else could be built here. The dome, the flats and the parks around you all stand on that cleaned-up ground.