Trinity Hospital & the Power Station

A small white almshouse sits here in the shadow of a power station. The low building with the little tower and battlements is Trinity Hospital, founded in 1613 by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, as a home for twelve poor men of Greenwich and eight from his native Norfolk. More than four hundred years later it still does the same job, today as homes for older people of limited means, run by the Mercers' Company. Towering over it is Greenwich Power Station, opened in 1906 to power London's electric trams. Its builders picked a difficult spot, because the station stands almost exactly on the line of the Prime Meridian, right below the Royal Observatory on the hill. The astronomers objected that the chimneys would spoil their observations, and the second pair were built shorter to keep the peace. The station has never quite retired. Since 1988 it has been the emergency power supply for the London Underground. A short walk along the river is the Trafalgar Tavern, opened in 1837. Charles Dickens set the wedding breakfast in Our Mutual Friend there, and Victorian cabinet ministers came for its famous whitebait dinners. The last was in 1885, when Gladstone's outgoing government dined together.