2025 at Royal Museums Greenwich will see the opening of a new major exhibition Pirates in March, which traces the changing depictions of pirates through the ages.
The Royal Observatory Greenwich will be celebrating its 350th anniversary with a year-long calendar of public events including activities, talks and special planetarium shows. The Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition will return to the National Maritime Museum in September, displaying another year of breath-taking space images.
Pirates
National Maritime Museum
29 March 2025
In March 2025 the major exhibition Pirates will open at the National Maritime Museum tracing the changing depictions of pirates through the ages and revealing the brutal history obscured by fiction. Whether as comical characters, like Captain Pugwash, villains like Captain Hook and Long John Silver or anti-heroes like Captain Jack Sparrow, pirates have captured the imagination for generations. Covering theatre, film and fashion the exhibition brings together material from early literature on piracy in the eighteenth-century, to 1980s haute couture.
While often portrayed as tricksters or scoundrels pirates are primarily depicted as swashbuckling adventurers associated with lush islands, flamboyant dress and buried treasure. Pirates will deconstruct these myths and illuminate the realities of pirate life, including the pirates Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, William Kidd, Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
In Britain today, we think of pirates from the Caribbean seas, but historic piratical activity was far reaching, taking different forms throughout the world. The exhibition will cover piracy across the globe looking at the South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Barbary pirates who operated off the coast of North Africa.
ROG 350
Royal Observatory Greenwich
January 2025
In 2025, the Royal Observatory Greenwich celebrates its 350th anniversary. Founded by Charles II in 1675 to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea and save sailors’ lives, the Royal Observatory Greenwich also became the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian, making it one of the most important historic scientific sites in the world.
In this landmark year, there will be a series of events and activities that celebrate the rich history of the site and the work we do today. 350 years of pioneering research will be celebrated in talks, special planetarium shows, hand-on activities and stargazing events.
Daily tours will also focus on 350 years of the Royal Observatory as a home to the Astronomers Royal and explain how and why the Royal Observatory became the centre of time.
Astronomy Photographer of the Year Exhibition
Royal Observatory Greenwich and National Maritime Museum
September 2025
Astronomy Photographer of the Year returns to the National Maritime Museum in 2025 to celebrate the very best in astrophotography from around the world. The winning images are selected by an expert judging panel, including Royal Observatory Greenwich Astronomers. After the awards are announced in September 2025, winners will be displayed alongside a selection of the shortlist images in a special exhibition at the National Maritime Museum. Now in its seventeenth year, the 2024 competition received over 3,500 entries from enthusiastic amateurs and professional photographers, taken from 58 countries across the globe.
