In 1939, the British Admiralty agreed to move the Royal Observatory from Greenwich to a better site away from London. The removal was postponed due to the Second World War, and the observatory’s re-establishment at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex in the 1940s and 1950s was further delayed by post-war economic difficulties. This paper examines several proposals to remove the observatory that were put forward over a period spanning slightly more than a century before 1939 and asks why none of these were taken up. I argue that the lateness of the move was due partly to astronomers’ fears that the observatory would lose its prestige if moved away from the famous Greenwich meridian and also to certain cultural aspects of professional astronomy in early twentieth-century Britain.

中文翻译：

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搬迁皇家天文台的提议，格林威治，1836 年至 1944 年

1939 年，英国海军部同意将皇家天文台从格林威治搬到一个更好的地点，远离伦敦。由于第二次世界大战，拆除工作被推迟，1940 年代和 1950 年代在苏塞克斯的 Herstmonceux 城堡重建天文台也因战后经济困难而进一步推迟。本文研究了在 1939 年之前一个多世纪的时间里提出的几项拆除天文台的建议，并询问为什么这些建议都没有被采纳。我认为，搬迁迟到的部分原因是天文学家担心如果搬离著名的格林威治子午线，天文台将失去其声望，以及 20 世纪早期英国专业天文学的某些文化方面。