The Life and Death of London's Crystal Palace (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Death of London's Crystal Palace (2021)

heritagecalling.com

53 pointszeristor17 comments

Back in my school days it was on my route home and I used to break into the site (it was fenced off at the time).

It felt so mysterious and strange. Headless statues, vast empty terraces - the old high level station ticket hall passed under a main road and come out the other side with a view of a huge railway tunnel blocked with an old wrought iron fence.

It's been cleaned up and opened to the public since then - which is almost a shame.

There's a little free-entry one-or-two-room museum on the site: https://www.crystalpalacemuseum.org.uk/ (though ironically it is currently closed due to fire damage; normally open on Sunday afternoons) which has some photographs and various bits of memorabilia relating to the building. If you're planning on wandering down to the site and looking at the dinosaurs, it's worth dropping in here too.

The museum has been closed for a while due to… a fire. :( Fortunately not too much damage was done and they say it will reopen at some undefined point in the future.

The Subway has recently been refurbished and looks nice. :) https://www.crystalpalaceparktrust.org/pages/crystal-palace-...

The dinos are getting a bit of love too at the moment it seems (was there last weekend and there is some construction going on the island and the lake around it.

It’s a very nice park to visit. :)

Remains are visible here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4226201,-0.0739698,953m/data...

Looking at the badge of Crystal Palace FC, I guess those towers either side are the water towers mentioned in the piece?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_F.C.#/media/Fil...

My Dad had a lump of fused glass scavenged from the fire site, which he lost in the blitz when the family home in Stepney was bombed out. I bet a lot of London kids had souvenirs like this.

alas it no longer exists, all that remains is a steep hill and a park. within that park are some plastic dinosaur, where I found out for the first time my gf from arizona didnt believe in evoluion. Not that I had a problem with it, its just my only memory of what must have been an amazing place.

In fact the dinosaur statues are not plastic. They were constructed from cast concrete in sections and supported internally by brickwork. I used to love visiting crystal palace to see them as a child.

The dinosaurs are concrete, and date from 1852. That's 7 years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and 55 years before the invention of plastic. So they're a kind of amazing window into the pre-history of paleontology. Really great artefacts, well worth seeing.

Anyhow,hope you eventually got a better girlfriend.

I had NO idea about the origin of the dinosaurs! Thank you for explaining it to me without getting too annoyed I called them plastic lol.

It is linked on the submitted page, but since not everybody checks every link, I would like to point to these 47 wonderful enhanced images at https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/results/?...

It took me a few seconds of confusion, each image is on its own page and tiny - you need to click on the "Full Screen" icon in the upper right corner of that tiny image to see the full quality.

This page has an illustration from that strange interlude during which photographs weren't mass-reproducible, so the image had to be manually engraved on a wooden printing plate to be reproduced.

"Our image above isn’t a photograph but a print made from an engraving, made from a daguerreotype – one of the first photographic processes. Engravings could easily be printed multiple times and used to illustrate books, whereas photographs could not. "

This page has one image from the curious interval, during which it was possible to take photos, but not to mass - reproduce them; so to do so a photo was manually transferred by an engraver to a wooden printing plate.

I wonder what things we do we today will seem as anachronistic.

I visited the site many times with my dad. I wonder why the building seemed to susceptible to fire, given that it was a metal and glass construction? Was is it the nature of the exhibits?

It's a shame they didn't rebuild it in the 60s.

It was thought to likely be an electrical fire in the offices at one end of the building, but it had lots of flammable things inside it, but also no real fire breaks/containment like you'd have in a modern building. Wooden floors, wooden furniture, lacquered surfaces, lots of potted trees, cluttered exhibits and low budget concessions. The fire became unmanageable really quickly and presumably once glass is falling from a great height, it becomes unsafe to tackle any individual aspect.

But it was also really a neglected building by then; it was not the glamorous event space it was designed for when it was on the Hyde Park site. The money was running out for the company running it at Sydenham.

The opening chapter of Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home has a bit about the Crystal Palace:

> The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling— indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor’s first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening splendor.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/20575/at-home-by-bil...

I've always loved that description in particular from the book. Thank you for quoting it!

I should go and read it again, but I think I remember I've pushed it on somebody to borrow years ago, "you gotta read this!". Just... who...?

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