Royal view

With astonishing foresight, when Christopher Wren designed his 1696 Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (which in 1873 became the Royal Naval College), he planned a lawn between the two wings. This should, in due course, have enabled the Queen to gaze over the trees and across the Thames from her Greenwich palace (behind my camera) towards the splendidly illuminated Canary Wharf, home to Britain's revered bankers.

Unfortunately, before anyone had enough steel and glass to build Canary Wharf, the medieval dockyards near the Tower of London proved too congested and insecure for expanding trade, and new docks were built right where Canary Wharf was supposed to be. Expansion continued throughout the nineteenth century and by the middle of the twentieth the busy docks with their countless spiky cranes seemed a permanent feature. Aged 11, not far from here, I spent several school geography lessons drawing a meticulous map of London's docks and learning that the West India Dock was where sugar, coffee and rum arrived from the Caribbean; that St Katharine Dock was built to export wool and bring in tea from India and China as well as wine, ostrich feathers, ivory, turtles and spices; that grain arrived at Millwall Dock and timber at the Surrey Docks; and the Victoria Dock was the first dock designed to receive steam ships and be connected to the railway network.

But my map was soon useless. Even before I left school everything had changed: cargos were now transported in containers and needed bigger docks nearer the sea. By the 1980s Prime Minister Thatcher was very happy to be shot of the stroppy dockers with their penchant for striking for safer conditions and better pay. Finally their old workplace could be converted into a home for the bankers.

But sadly, in the intervening centuries the Queen had got fed up with waiting for the view to be built and had moved to Buckingham Palace.

This is what she's missing. (You have to look large at this one.)

Edit - just realised I stole this.