Cutty Sark & the Foot Tunnel

The Cutty Sark was built in 1869 to do one thing faster than anyone else: bring tea from China to London. The tea clippers raced each other home, because the first cargo of the new season fetched the best price. She could hardly have been launched at a worse moment. The Suez Canal opened that same month, giving steamships a short cut that sailing ships could not use, and within a few years the tea trade was lost to steam. So she turned to carrying wool from Australia instead, and on that run she was among the fastest ships afloat, with some voyages taking just 73 days. Her name comes from a poem by Robert Burns. In Tam o' Shanter a young witch wearing a cutty sark, Scots for a short shirt, chases Tam on his horse and pulls off its tail. Look at the figurehead. She is holding the tail in her hand. The ship has stood in dry dock here since 1954, and after a fire in 2007 she was raised three metres so that visitors can walk beneath her hull. The round, domed building close by is the entrance to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, opened in 1902 so that workers could walk under the river to the docks and shipyards on the Isle of Dogs. It is 370 metres long, lined with some two hundred thousand white tiles, and open day and night.