The Story of Time

The Royal Observatory has long been devoted to the telling of the history of time and timekeepers on the historic Greenwich site. The Home of Time is now launching its most ambitious project to date, an all-encompassing exhibition on time.

Containing objects on loan from 150 museums around the world, ‘The Story of Time’ will open at a moment when, more than ever before, peoples’ imagination is focused on the meaning of time. Paintings by Canaletto, Turner, Titian, Poussin, Rauschenberg and Dali rub shoulders with Chinese ancestor-portraits, the earliest known dated watch, tenth-century manuscripts and a twentieth-century photograph taken by the Hubble telescope. And veritable icons of time on show include the metronome used by Ludwig van Beethoven or Albert Einstein’s handwritten notes on the Theory of Relativity.