Proposals to Move the Royal Observatory,Greenwich,1836–1944

Abstract

In 1939, the British Admiralty agreed to move the Royal Observatory from Greenwich to a better site away from London. The removal was postponed due to the Second World War, and the observatory’s re-establishment at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex in the 1940s and 1950s was further delayed by post-war economic difficulties. This paper examines several proposals to remove the observatory that were put forward over a period spanning slightly more than a century before 1939 and asks why none of these were taken up. I argue that the lateness of the move was due partly to astronomers’ fears that the observatory would lose its prestige if moved away from the famous Greenwich meridian and also to certain cultural aspects of professional astronomy in early twentieth-century Britain.