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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
14 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadIt's a shame they didn't rebuild it in the 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_F.C.#/media/Fil...
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4226201,-0.0739698,953m/data...
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.
Anyhow,hope you eventually got a better girlfriend.
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.
> 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...
"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. "
I wonder what things we do we today will seem as anachronistic.