Greenwich

A palace site, a naval hospital, an observatory and a tea clipper, arranged along one bend of the Thames.

Greenwich is where England arranged its monarchy, its navy and its science along one bend of the Thames, and the whole scheme is still legible from the top of the hill. A Tudor palace stood on the riverbank - Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were both born on the ground the Old Royal Naval College now covers - and after it decayed, William III and Mary II founded a hospital there for injured and elderly seamen. Christopher Wren laid it out in four blocks, split down the middle so the Queen's House behind kept its view of the water. That house, begun for Anne of Denmark in 1616 and finished for Henrietta Maria, was the first properly classical building in England; it is now the middle of the National Maritime Museum, the largest museum of the sea in the world. Up the hill, Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 to solve a practical problem: how a ship out of sight of land could know its longitude. The answer turned out to be an accurate clock, and John Harrison's are here; the world took its prime meridian from a line drawn through a telescope in this building. Down by the pier the Cutty Sark, the last of the tea clippers, is held three metres above her dock so that you can walk under the hull. Around all of it: a covered market, a deer park, pubs on the water, and the best way in, which is by boat.