Gravitational lenses offer the possibility of accurately determining the
Hubble parameter (H_0) over cosmological distances, and B0218+357 is one of the
most promising systems for an application of this technique. In particular this
system has an accurately measured time delay (10.5+/-0.4 d; Biggs et al. 1999)
and preliminary mass modelling has given a value for H_0 of 69 +13/-19
km/s/Mpc. The error on this estimate is now dominated by the uncertainty in the
mass modelling. As this system contains an Einstein ring it should be possible
to constrain the model better by imaging the ring at high resolution. To
achieve this we have combined data from MERLIN and the VLA at a frequency of 5
GHz. In particular MERLIN has been used in multi-frequency mode in order to
improve substantially the aperture coverage of the combined data set. The
resulting map is the best that has been made of the ring and contains many new
and interesting features. Efforts are currently underway to exploit the new
data for lensing constraints using the LensClean algorithm (Kochanek & Narayan
1992).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 6 pages, 4 included PostScript
figure