Crystal Palace

 

Crystal Palace

Susannah moved to Crystal Palace late last year and sent some photographs of Crystal Palace Park, usually referred to simply as Crystal Palace. They awoke some memories in her cousin, Pamela, who remembers walking past the dinosaurs weekly as she and her brother and sister travelled to Crystal Palace for training. They were part of the pre-Olympic swimming squad.

The dinosaurs in Crystal Park Palace were unveiled in 1854 and are now Grade I listed. They were the first full-scale reconstructions of these animals.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Grade 1 listed buildings head the list for protection and preservation and are considered to be of ‘exceptional interest’ for their historical, architectural, and national importance. The dinosaurs share this distinction with Buckingham Palace, the Cenotaph, and the Houses of Parliament, among many more. Had Crystal Palace itself not been destroyed by fire in 1936, it, too, would have become a listed building.

There are around thirty sculptures, designed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894) with the guidance and expertise of the palaentologist Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) Not all the sculptures are dinosaurs – there are amphibians, and mammals, too, like the long-extinct Irish Elk.

The models were constructed according to the knowledge at the time, and thus the Megalosaurus was depicted as a quadruped, when later scientific discoveries found that it was bipedal.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Naturally, wind and weather have affected the sculptures and repairs have been sympathetically conducted by skilled craftsmen. The Megalosaurus has had new teeth – twenty-two of them – a new nose and lower jaw, all carefully matched to the colour of the original.

Work on regenerating the park is due to begin this year, 2025.