On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, John Rowland wrote:

Paul Terry wrote:
In message , John Rowland
writes

Does anyone know what this object by Saunders Ness Road is?

Purely a guess, but since it is opposite Greenwich, is it marking the
prime meridian on the north side of the river?

That's a good thought, but it's not exactly north of the observatory.

Nor's the prime meridian - it's 5.31 seconds of arc east of it. However,
the dalek is 19.23 seconds west of the meridian, so it's not lined up with
it anyway. Also, the meridian only moved from the observatory in the 80s
(i think) and the dalek looks older than that. It doesn't look like the
kind of thing you'd build to mark a meridian anyway.

However, examining the 1898 Booth map:

http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl...=298&m.v.y=105

Reveals that the dalek is exactly, as far as i can tell, at the head of a
long thin structure that lay pependicular to the waterfront marked 'Ship
Bldg Yard', which i would guess was a slipway.

The dalek has windows round the top which make it look like a midget
lighthouse, so it could be a beacon marking the slipway, perhaps one of a
pair of leading lights, but i can't think why you'd want leading lights on
a slipway. It could just have been for illumination rather than as a
beacon, but why would you build that precisely at the head? Wouldn't
illuminate much.

It could be a bollard, to which you'd make fast ropes used to hold a boat
in the slipway. But i don't see any rings or other sticky-out bits to
which you might fix ropes, and why would it have windows on?

tom

--
PS I am trying to stab a giant warthog in the arse but it keeps throwing
me off a bridge -- Martin Lewis