Track 08 · High ground · 1:31
The whole walk as one file · the route as GPX · the podcast feed
Stop seven. The Hampstead Observatory.
A small white dome on the roof of a Victorian reservoir, at the highest point of the highest hill in inner London. It was built in nineteen ten by the Hampstead Scientific Society, which had been formed eleven years earlier by local people who wanted to look at things, and the Society is still running it now, with volunteers, a hundred and sixteen years later.
Inside is a six-inch Cooke refractor from the end of the nineteenth century, lent to the Society in nineteen twenty three by a member and never taken back. It is a beautiful piece of brass engineering and it is still the instrument they use.
Here is the part worth writing down. It is open to the public, it is free, and almost nobody in London knows. Friday and Saturday evenings, eight until ten, from the middle of September to the middle of April, plus Sunday mornings to look at the sun through the proper filters. All of that is weather permitting, which in this country is doing a great deal of work.
You are two hundred metres from a tube station, looking at Saturn, for nothing, in a shed on a reservoir. That is the single most Hampstead sentence in this guide.
Back to Hampstead Grove and keep climbing north. Ninety seconds, and the road runs out at a junction with a pond in the middle of it.
51.56057, -0.18004 · where this is on a map