Qualla: Crystal Palace Park

Crystal Palace Park: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SheffGruff, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the night of 30 November 1936, the largest glass building in the world burned to the ground in south London. The flames could be seen across most of southern England, and on the BBC the next morning Winston Churchill called it "the end of an age." Crystal Palace had been at the centre of this hilltop park for eighty-two years, the Victorian wonder rebuilt and enlarged here in 1854 after its first life as the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition. The Palace was gone by morning. The park was not. The fountains, the dinosaurs, the lake, the cricket ground, the long Italian terraces, all of it remained, and the park has been a curious kind of monument to absence ever since, the open space where a building used to be.

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Image: SheffGruff | CC BY-SA 3.0

Crystal Palace Park: Paxton's Second Act

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Henry Delamotte (1821–1889), Public domain. Sir Joseph Paxton had built the original Crystal Palace as a temporary pavilion in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. When the government decreed the structure had to come down, Paxton refused to let it die. He formed the Crystal Palace Company, bought the building for £...

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Image: Philip Henry Delamotte (1821–1889) | Public domain

Crystal Palace Park: Dinosaurs Before Anyone Knew

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jes from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk down to the southeast corner of the park and you will find them: full-scale concrete sculptures of dinosaurs and extinct mammals, half-hidden in a deliberately designed "geological" landscape around the tidal lake. The sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins finished thirty-thr...

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Image: Jes from Melbourne, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Crystal Palace Park: The Wembley Before Wembley

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Svetlopisac, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the cricket ground opened in 1857 (it became the home of London County Cricket Club from 1900 to 1908, with W.G. Grace involved in the club's founding), the park steadily filled up with sport. In 1894 the two largest fountains were grassed over. In 1895 the south basin was ...

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Image: Svetlopisac | CC BY-SA 4.0

Crystal Palace Park: Bob Marley's Last London Show

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doyle of London, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 7 June 1980, Bob Marley played the Crystal Palace Bowl, a natural amphitheatre tucked into the park's northern corner. It was his last and largest concert in London. He was dying. A melanoma diagnosed in 1977 had spread, and within a year he would be gone, dead at thirty-six i...

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Image: Doyle of London | CC BY-SA 4.0

Crystal Palace Park: A New Chapter

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. After the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986, the park passed to the London Borough of Bromley, which restored the dinosaurs and a third of the grounds between 2001 and 2003. The decades since have been a long argument about what the park is for. Proposals in 1989, 1997...

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Image: Public domain