CRYSTAL PALACE: THE PALACE THAT VANISHED
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, September 22nd, we’re going south.
Deep south.
Because today I’m walking two more sections of The Ultimate London Walk. The London Camino. Fourteen walks, 42 miles, from the Hertfordshire border in the north all the way down to the Surrey Downs.
Yesterday I got as far as Sydenham Hill.
Today, first up, it’s Sydenham Hill to Anerley. And then, this afternoon, Anerley to South Norwood.
And that means today I’m going to see dinosaurs.
Not just any dinosaurs.
Victorian dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs that are older than On the Origin of Species.
And dinosaurs that, wonderfully, have just been given a new lease of life.
So today, Crystal Palace.
And what a London story this is.
Except, of course, it doesn’t begin in Crystal Palace.
It begins in Hyde Park.
It’s 1851. Britain is putting on the Great Exhibition. Think of it as the biggest shop window the world had ever seen. Machinery. Textiles. Scientific instruments. Manufactured goods. Stuff from all over the globe.
The Victorians saying, essentially, come and have a look at what we can do.
And they needed somewhere to put it all.
Enter Joseph Paxton.
Paxton wasn’t primarily an architect. He was a gardener. He’d designed enormous greenhouses at Chatsworth, and that greenhouse experience gave him the idea.
Why not build an enormous greenhouse?
Iron and glass. Prefabricated parts. Repetition. Mass production.
And up it went.
A building unlike anything London had ever seen.
The Crystal Palace.
Actually, that wasn’t its official name initially. The nickname caught on. And no wonder.
Imagine seeing it in 1851.
A colossal glass building sitting in Hyde Park, glittering in the sunlight. So large they didn’t even have to cut down some of the mature elm trees on the site. They simply enclosed them inside it.
The building was more than three times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Six million people came to the Great Exhibition.
And then, after just a few months, it was over.
So what do you do with one of the wonders of the age?
You take it down.
And that’s exactly what they did.
But here comes the wonderful bit.
They didn’t throw it away.
They moved it.
To Sydenham.
Or, more precisely, to the slopes of Sydenham Hill, then well beyond the edge of London.
And they didn’t merely rebuild it.
They made it bigger.
The new Crystal Palace opened in 1854, surrounded by vast pleasure grounds. This was no longer just an exhibition building. It was becoming something altogether more ambitious.
Education. Entertainment. Spectacle.
There were displays showing the development of civilisation and natural history. There were concerts, exhibitions, commercial showrooms, a theatre, an enormous shopping bazaar.
Victorian infotainment, if you like.
And then there were the dinosaurs.
Now, these are wonderful.
They were created under the direction of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, working with the great palaeontologist Richard Owen.
And here’s what makes them so special.
They were the world’s first life-sized models of prehistoric animals.
Nobody had ever seen anything like them.
And, yes, some of them look wrong to us now.
Of course they do.
Science moved on.
More fossils were discovered. Our understanding of dinosaurs changed dramatically.
But that’s precisely why I love them.
Because they’re not just models of dinosaurs.
They’re models of what Victorians thought dinosaurs looked like.
They’re fossils of scientific thought.
And there’s another lovely story here.
Before the park opened, Waterhouse Hawkins held a dinner party inside one of the dinosaur models.
Just stop there for a second.
A Victorian dinner party.
Inside a dinosaur.
How do you improve on that?
And those extraordinary creatures are still there.
Indeed, right now is probably the best time in years to see them.
All 30 of the Grade I-listed prehistoric sculptures have undergone a major conservation programme. They’ve been repaired, restored and repainted in colours based on evidence for their historic appearance.
And this summer they were officially removed from Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register.
One hundred and seventy-two years old.
And looking rather pleased with themselves.
But the thing they were built to accompany is gone.
The Palace itself survived into the 20th century.
And then came November 30th, 1936.
Fire.
It apparently began small.
It didn’t stay small.
The flames raced through the enormous building. Eighty-eight fire engines came. Four hundred and thirty-eight firefighters fought the blaze.
They couldn’t save it.
The glow could be seen for miles.
And by the end of the night, one of the most famous buildings in the world was effectively gone.
There’s something almost unbearably poignant about Crystal Palace today.
Because the name survived the thing it named.
Crystal Palace is a place.
It’s a railway station.
It’s a football club.
It’s on buses. Road signs. Maps.
Everybody knows Crystal Palace.
But there is no Crystal Palace.
Instead, you walk through the park and find ghosts.
The terraces are still there. Bits and pieces survive. The extraordinary subway survives. And if you know what you’re looking at, the landscape begins to reconstruct the vanished building for you.
And down below, wonderfully, absurdly, magnificently, the dinosaurs are still keeping watch.
Which seems somehow right.
The Palace vanished.
The monsters survived.
And today, on the Ultimate London Walk, I’ll be walking straight through their world.
Okay. Word time.
And today’s word has nothing whatsoever to do with dinosaurs.
Except perhaps it has everything to do with looking carefully at things.
The word is analysis.
And I’ve got a little bee in my bonnet about this one.
Over the years I’ve had plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists on London Walks.
And when I discover what they do for a living, I sometimes ask them a question.
“What does analysis originally mean?”
And, amazingly, they very often don’t know.
The word comes ultimately from Greek: ana plus lysis.
And lysis is a loosening. An unbinding. A releasing.
So analysis is fundamentally about loosening something up, taking it apart.
And just think about psychoanalysis.
Freud.
Things locked away. Things bound up. Memories, fears, desires, feelings buried somewhere down there.
And analysis loosens them.
Releases them.
Brings them out where they can be examined.
Now I know next to nothing about psychiatry.
But if I were teaching Psychology 101, that would be there on day one.
Probably minute one.
Analysis. A loosening. An unbinding. A releasing.
Sometimes the oldest meaning of a word switches a light on.
And that’ll do us for today.
Dinosaurs restored.
A palace vanished.
And two more sections of the London Camino waiting to be walked.
London. Never knowingly under-historied.
See ya tomorrow.