You're climbing through Greenwich Park now, up toward the Observatory at the top. This is one of the oldest enclosed royal parks in London — walled off back in the fourteen hundreds as a private hunting ground for kings, and there are still deer up here, descendants of a herd kept for royalty to chase across this very hill. Stop and turn around for a second, because this is the view the whole climb is famous for: the river below, the masts of the Cutty Sark, the glass towers of Canary Wharf stacked up across the water, and on a clear day the dome of Saint Paul's floating in the distance. Kings and queens have walked this exact slope for six hundred years. But that's not why I stopped you on the hill. I stopped you because somewhere on this grass, in eighteen ninety-four, a man blew his own hand off trying to attack time itself.
His name was Martial Bourdin, a young French anarchist, and he was walking up through this park carrying a home-made bomb. Historians think his target was the
Observatory at the top — that he wanted to destroy the very place that told the world what time it was, as a strike against order, against the machine of modern life. It was, when you think about it, an incredibly abstract thing to want to bomb. Not a king, not a bank. A clock. The concept of everyone agreeing what time it is.
He never got there. The bomb went off early, in his hands, right here
