View of Late Eighteenth-Century London from Greenwich Park

During the Georgian period Londoners loved to come to Greenwich Park. The views, as seen in the engraving, were stupendous, and most people considered it the best vantage spot from which to view London itself. The park itself was a beautiful spot to walk (as it remains today), and in Georgian times it was well stocked with deer. A late-eighteenth-century writer enthused, "The views from the Observatory and One-Tree Hill are beautiful beyond imagination, particularly the former. The projection of these hills is so bold, that you do not look down upon a gradually falling slope, but at once upon the tops of branching trees, which grow in knots and clumps out of dead hollows and embrowning dells. The cattle which feed on the lawns and appear in breaks among them, seem moving in a region of fairy land. A thousand natural openings among the branches of the trees break upon little picturesque views of the swelling surf, which, when illuminated by the sun, have an effect pleasing beyond the power of fancy to exhibit."

Closer, the viewer could make out Greenwich Hospital for disabled seamen (the twin domes to the right) as well as the Isle of Dogs and the "floating millions" of the Thames (in this period the Thames would have been crowded with many hundreds of cargo ships as well men of war and pleasure and fishing vessels).