Crystal Palace Park: £22 million Upgrade, 2025
Visitors to Crystal Palace Park this summer and autumn 2025 are likely to find that access to sections of the park will be restricted while work takes place on a £22 million upgrade sanctioned by Bromley Council. Never mind! - it will be brilliant surely to see the end product that promises a facelift for areas of the park that currently do look a bit neglected and tatty.
Two of the most famous features of the park are the model dinosaurs beside the lower lake and on the top ridge the empty flat base of the grand glass palace that burned down in 1936 having been relocated in 1854 from its original base in Hyde Park in 1851.
In our Sign Here! book (Cray 150 Publications, 2024) we credit the children's author Penelope Lively for writing Fanny and the Monsters. It is a very amusing story for children set in Victorian times and featuring the model dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. Fanny (age ten) is entranced when she sees the monsters with ‘their great claws plunged into the London mud and their tails lashing the still water of the lake.’ You can still see them today and if you arrive by rail you'll see an information board in the station recounting how on New Year’s Eve 1853 the park was opened with a ceremonial banquet seated inside the giant iguanodon!
Our Sign Here! book describes how famous people in the London Borough of Bromley are commemorated by blue plaques, inscriptions, monuments, etc. We include mention that a blue plaque commemorates Sir Joseph Paxton (1803 – 1865) the designer of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and another reminds us of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807 – 1889) the artist and zoologist who designed the giant dinosaur models for the Crystal Palace Park.
Visitors to Crystal Palace Park this summer and autumn 2025 are likely to find that access to sections of the park will be restricted while work takes place on a £22 million upgrade sanctioned by Bromley Council. Never mind! - it will be brilliant surely to see the end product that promises a facelift for areas of the park that currently do look a bit neglected and tatty.
Two of the most famous features of the park are the model dinosaurs beside the lower lake and on the top ridge the empty flat base of the grand glass palace that burned down in 1936 having been relocated in 1854 from its original base in Hyde Park in 1851.
In our Sign Here! book (Cray 150 Publications, 2024) we credit the children's author Penelope Lively for writing Fanny and the Monsters. It is a very amusing story for children set in Victorian times and featuring the model dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. Fanny (age ten) is entranced when she sees the monsters with ‘their great claws plunged into the London mud and their tails lashing the still water of the lake.’ You can still see them today and if you arrive by rail you'll see an information board in the station recounting how on New Year’s Eve 1853 the park was opened with a ceremonial banquet seated inside the giant iguanodon!
Our Sign Here! book describes how famous people in the London Borough of Bromley are commemorated by blue plaques, inscriptions, monuments, etc. We include mention that a blue plaque commemorates Sir Joseph Paxton (1803 – 1865) the designer of the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and another reminds us of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807 – 1889) the artist and zoologist who designed the giant dinosaur models for the Crystal Palace Park.
With the new 2025/26 football season in prospect we pause to mention a notable match played by our local Cray Wanderers team 130 years ago at the end of the 1895/96 season. Taking part in the Sevenoaks Charity Cup competition the Wands reached the final and duly lined up at Crystal Palace to play Sheppey United. This was the Victorian equivalent of playing at Wembley! - for in those days the F.A. Cup final was played at Crystal Palace in front of vast crowds watching the likes of Aston Villa, Manchester City, Manchester United, Newcastle United, etc. The sponsors of the Sevenoaks Charity Cup had ambitiously hired the Crystal Palace ground for the cup final. Cray Wanderers considered it to be a sufficiently exciting and prestigious occasion to splash out for a team photograph. We wish we could report that Cray came home with the splendid silver plate valued by Spinks at 120 guineas but to the disappointment of an estimated 400 supporters who travelled from St Mary Cray it was Sheppey who won the game 1 - 0.
The F.A. Cup final was staged at Crystal Palace every year from 1895 (having transferred from The Oval) to 1914. The record gate for a final there was 120,081 for Aston Villa v Sunderland in 1913.
The F.A. Cup final was staged at Crystal Palace every year from 1895 (having transferred from The Oval) to 1914. The record gate for a final there was 120,081 for Aston Villa v Sunderland in 1913.