We join the cruise boat at Waterloo Pier.  Amongst others, we will see these sights along the way: Big Ben, The BA London Eye, Cleopatra's Needle, St Paul’s Cathedral, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, The Monument, The Tower Of London, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, The Cutty Sark and Greenwich Palace. We disembark at Greenwich Pier.

London's city cathedral was designed by Sir Christopher Wren.  Work was started 9 years after the medieval church had been burnt down in the Great Fire.  The cathedral has been extensively restored in recent years.  The exterior has had the grime of the ages removed, and clear glass (as specified in Wren's original design) has replaced the wartime bomb damaged stained glass.  You can climb up in to the Whispering gallery in the dome, where a whisper at one side carries right round the dome.  Then it’s up to the Stone Gallery giving a view over the city, and up to the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome.  The crypt is equally impressive, with the tombs of both Nelson and Wellington (complete with the 18 ton carriage that took his body to the cathedral in 1852).

 

The calendar is a system of reckoning time over extended intervals by combining days into longer groupings which are linked to the way in which we live.  The groupings often have religious significance and some of the groups are linked to astronomical periods. 

Our calendar is made up of days, weeks, months and years.  The day is the rotational period of the Earth; the week is a purely artificial period linked to the Biblical story of creation; the month is linked to the period of the Moon and the year is linked to the Earth's period of rotation around the Sun.

The definition of the day seems very simple.  It should be the time taken for one passage of the Sun across the meridian to its next crossing.  Unfortunately the Earth's movement around the Sun is not circular and this causes the time indicated by a sundial to be different from that measured by a clock. (The difference is called the Equation of Time.)  Nor is the Earth's rotation period constant, although the variations are very small.  So we use a length for the day which represents the Earth's average rotation period.  Occasionally we have to insert `leap-seconds' to correct from this exact measure to the slightly irregular rotation of the Earth.

Mosaic law forbidding work on every seventh day established a seven-day period as a measure of Jewish time.  This passed over into the Christian church and gradually became established in the Roman calendar.  The astrological practice of naming the days using the names of the Sun, Moon and the five known planets also yielded a seven day period.  The names that we give to the days of the week are still based on this nomenclature.  In English Sunday and Monday are named after the Sun and Moon while the other days of the week are named after the teutonic versions of the gods that correspond to each planet. Tiu = Mars, Woden = Mercury, Thor = Jupiter and Freya = Venus, Saturday keeping its Latin connection with Saturn.

Many ancient calendars were based on the lunar cycle.  The lunar month is 29.530589 days and the number of lunations in a year is 12.368267.  The most common scheme was to have 12 months of 30 days with either arbitrary or calculated additional days or months to bring the system into accord with the solar year.  Originally the Roman calendar had 10 months; Martius (named after Mars and indicating the time for resumption of war), Aprilis (after the word for `to open', hence Spring), Maius (after Maia, the goddess of growth), Junius (after juvenis, meaning youth), Quintilius, Sextilis, Septembris, Octobris, Novembris and Decembris (meaning the fifth to tenth months). The Romans had a dislike of even numbers as these symbolized death and so the months had either 29 or 31 days.  King Numa increased the number of months to 12 by introducing Januarius (after the god Janus, the protector of doorways and hence the opening of the year) and Februarius (after Februalia, the time for sacrifices at the end of the year). The order of the months was later changed.  In order to reconcile the solar and lunar years, at the recommendation of Sosigenes Julius Caesar altered the lengths of the months and the change to our present format was completed by Caesar Augustus.  They both claimed the names of one of the months and this gave rise to Julius and Augustus which replaced Quintilius and Sextilis.

 The number of days in one revolution of the Earth around the Sun is 365.2422 days.  Unfortunately, this is not a whole number and so if we wish to keep the calendar in track with the seasons we must adopt some form of variable year length.  The first major attempt to accomplish this was by Julius Caesar.  Besides pinching a day from the last month of the year (then February) to make `his' month, July, have 31 days he introduced the Julian calendar.  February was further despoiled by Augustus Caesar who also purloined a day so as to make `his' month, August, also have 31 days.  As some sort of compensation the leap-day was given to February.  The Julian calendar introduced a year of length 365 days with a leap-year every 4 years.  It also moved the start of the year from March 25 to January 1.  The adopted length of the year, 365.25 days, is only slightly different from the actual length, 365.2422 days, but over the centuries the difference mounts up and by the 16th century had become noticeable. The effect is to move Spring and the date of Easter, which is related to the vernal equinox, closer to the date of Christmas.  The Gregorian reform to the calendar altered the rule for determining if a year should be a leap-year by stating that centenary years should only be leap-years if they were divisible by 400.  It also dropped several days from the calendar so that the vernal equinox was brought back to March 21.  The mean length of the calendar year is now 365.2425 days and the error compared with the true value amounts to only 3 days in 10,000 years.

The Jewish calendar and the Moslem calendar are intimately connected with the Moon.  The Jewish calendar is now a fixed calendar with rather complex rules for its construction.  The length of the Jewish year may be 353, 354 or 355 days or 383, 384 or 385 days.  Each month has 29 or 30 days.  The Moslem calendar is also a fixed calendar, but the religious festivals depend on visual sightings of the New Moon.  The length of the Moslem year is 12 months of alternate lengths 30 and 29 days, except for the 12th month which can have either 29 or 30 days.  The calendar is kept in adjustment with the Moon using a cycle of years of different length.

Many attempts have been made to reform the calendar using different ways of dividing up the year so as to give a perpetual calendar. For anyone with a liking for historic associations the present calendar, for all its apparent complexities is a remarkably good approximation to the non-simple relationship between the periods of the Earth's rotation, its period about the Sun and, to a lesser extent, the period of the Moon.

An opportunity to read up on some facts about London:

Remains of this wall can still be seen today in Coopers Row.  The Roman wall was still large enough to contain the city 1000 years later, when William the Conqueror arrived in the town, fresh from his victory at the Battle of Hastings.  By now the city of Westminster was developing to the west of the City of London.  Edward the Confessor had built his palace there and had established Westminster Abbey.  It was after the Norman Conquest that London became the capital of England.

In fact, the capital developed with two centres:

Westminster - the political centre

The City - as the merchant or trading centre

 By 1616, London was a busy city.  London Bridge had narrow arches and winter markets and festivals used to be held on the frozen River Thames below.  Houses and shops were built on the bridge itself.  Shakespeare's Globe Theatre had recently opened.  Most of the buildings were made of wood and being made of wood was the problem when a baker’s oven overheated in Pudding Lane on 2nd September 1666.  The fire quickly spread.  The Great Fire destroyed 13,000 houses in the old town, leaving 100,000 people homeless.  A new law was immediately passed decreeing that all new buildings had to be in stone or brick!  However, the fire, which burned for four days and four nights, wiped out the Great Plague and gave a marvellous opportunity for rebuilding - note particularly St Paul's Cathedral.  The area continued to develop as a financial centre of the world. 

The arrival of the railway created another wave of development in the late 1800's.  St Pancras then and now looks more like a Gothic castle than a railway station.  Other large railway stations were built all round the edge of the main town.

During the Second World War (1939-45), another great change to the landscape took place as German bombing removed much of the old housing.  Bombing destroyed 20% of the buildings, but many historic buildings were saved and re-building has covered the scars.

Development continued in the 80's and 90's with some, but with not many skyscrapers. London has remained more immune to this form of development than most modern cities.