Old Royal Naval College

Where it sits. The Old Royal Naval College occupies the Greenwich riverfront on the south bank of the Thames, at the point where the river swings north around the Isle of Dogs. Four great courts — King Charles, Queen Anne, King William and Queen Mary — are arranged in two pairs with a deliberate gap down the middle, so that the axis from the water runs uninterrupted up to the Queen's House and on to the Royal Observatory on the hill behind. That gap was insisted upon so the older house would keep its river view, and it is the reason the ensemble works: from a boat, the twin domes frame a slot of green rising to the horizon. UNESCO inscribed the whole area as the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in 1997 and called it of outstanding universal value; it is routinely described as the finest architectural and landscape composition in the British Isles.

The story behind it. This was the site of Greenwich Palace, birthplace of Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I, which fell derelict during the Civil War and was demolished in 1694 apart from an unfinished block by John Webb. In 1692 Mary II, moved by the sight of sailors wounded at the Battle of La Hogue, ordered a Royal Hospital for Seamen on the site. Christopher Wren designed it and worked without fee; construction ran from 1696 to 1712, with Hawksmoor and later Thomas Ripley continuing the work. The hospital housed naval pensioners until it closed in 1869. From 1873 to 1998 the buildings served as the Royal Naval College, training officers, and since 1998 the site has been run by the Greenwich Foundation, with the University of Greenwich and Trinity Laban Conservatoire occupying much of the fabric under long leases. The buildings are Grade I listed.

The Painted Hall. The single interior that justifies the trip is James Thornhill's Painted Hall, worked on between 1707 and 1726 and covering some 4,000 square metres of ceiling and wall. It was designed as the pensioners' dining room and was immediately judged too grand for the purpose, so it was used for ceremony instead — Nelson's body lay here in January 1806 before the funeral procession upriver. Thornhill was paid by the square yard, three pounds for the ceiling and one for the walls, and he painted himself into the west wall at the end, hand outstretched, apparently still waiting to be paid. A conservation project costing £8.5 million cleaned and stabilised the whole scheme and reopened it in March 2019; during the works the public could walk a scaffold deck at ceiling height, and the paint now reads at a saturation nobody alive had seen. The Chapel of St Peter and St Paul opposite was rebuilt by James Stuart after a fire in 1779 and is a cool, pale neoclassical counterweight to the hall's baroque.

On screen. Few sites in Britain appear in more productions. The colonnades and courts stood in for Buckingham Palace in The King's Speech, carried the barricades of Les Misérables in April 2012, and became the Greenwich battleground of Thor: The Dark World, shot here in October 2012. Earlier credits include The Bounty, where Anthony Hopkins's Bligh is brought in by carriage and court-martialled, Patriot Games, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Madness of King George, The Mummy Returns, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Amazing Grace, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; more recently the first two seasons of the Netflix series The Diplomat. The Bond link here is geographic rather than architectural: the Thames boat chase that opens The World Is Not Enough (1999) begins at the SIS Building at Vauxhall and ends at the Millennium Dome — now the O2 — on the Greenwich Peninsula, a little over two kilometres north-east of these courts, so 007 passes the college at speed without ever setting foot in it.

What you actually see today. The grounds are open and free, laid out with lawns and plane trees between the ranges, and traffic-free, which is why film crews and joggers both favour them. Ticketed entry covers the Painted Hall and includes the undercroft, the skittle alley and the crypt; the chapel is free and holds a Sunday service at 11am open to all. The Visitor Centre carries the site's archaeology, including material from the Tudor palace. Cafés and a bar occupy the old buildings, and Trinity Laban students give frequent free lunchtime concerts.

Getting there and timing. Cutty Sark station on the Docklands Light Railway is five minutes' walk; Thames Clipper river boats stop at Greenwich Pier, which is the arrival the architecture was designed for. The foot tunnel under the river from Island Gardens gives the classic Canaletto view back at the ensemble. The Cutty Sark, the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House and the Royal Observatory are all within the same park, so a full day is easy to fill. Spring and early autumn give the best light down the axis; the riverside is exposed and cold in winter.