Measurement of the Hubble Constant Via Gravitational Lensing--- A Review of the Jodrell Bank ``Golden Lenses'' Workshop

Gravitational lensing is now widely and successfully used to study a range of astronomical phenomena, from individual objects, like galaxies and clusters, to the mass distribution on various scales, to the overall geometry of the Universe. Here we describe and assess the use of gravitational lensing as ``gold standards’’ in addressing one of the fundamental problems in astronomy, the determination of the absolute distance scale to extragalactic objects. This is commonly parameterized by the Hubble constant, $H_0$, the current expansion rate of the Universe. The elegance of the underlying geometrical principle of the gravitational lensing method combined with the recent advances in observations and modelling makes it a very promising technique for measuring $H_0$.