Crystal Palace Park
The building of Crystal Palace Park was probably the biggest thing ever to hit Norwood, Penge and the town of Croydon, the centre of which was less than 4 miles to the south. The building which housed The Great Exhibition of 1851, was always designed to be temporary but its designer, Joseph Paxton was determined that it lived on.
See also our Great Exhibition page.
When it became clear that it would not be allowed to remain in Hyde Park, he hatched an ambitious plan to rebuild it as the centrepiece of a new pleasure ground. The Crystal Palace as it had become known was not moved – all 18 acres (7 hectares) of it, comprising 4000 tons of cast iron, and millions of identical panes of glass. It went to 389-acre site consisted of woodland and the grounds of the mansion known as Penge Place owned by Paxton’s friend and railway entrepreneur Leo Schuster.
But, it was not just moved – it was redesigned, enlarged and repurposed. Paxton formed the Crystal Palace Company to do it. It cost £70,000 to buy the building, and £1.3 million to buy the site. It would have taken a similar effort to build the Palace the second time around, so would have needed some 5000 navvies; the development of the park cost considerably more. Edward Milner designed the Italian Garden and fountains, the Great Maze, and the English Landscape Garden, and Raffaele Monti was hired to design and build much of the external statuary around the fountain basins, and the urns, tazzas and vases.
Paxton was originally a gardener, and his original interest in glass buildings had started when he needed to support the passions of his employer, the Duke of Devonshire, for cultivating exotic plants such as pineapples and bananas, at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (the fictional home of May Carleton, the aristocratic racehorse trainer in Peaky Blinders). Indeed, Paxton cultivated the type of banana that is now almost universal. This work culminated in the Great Conservatory, the largest glass building in existence at the time; and a refinement of his ideas shown in the Lily House. Paxton consulted with the engineers designing the Palm House at Kew Gardens, and the Lily House was built to house a giant lily sent from there. Both were demolished in 1920, deemed unsustainable in the post-WWI world. An earlier greenhouse, modified by Paxton, survives; there is also a rare survival of one of Paxton’s more mass-produced models at Heligan.
The other great innovation that Paxton brought to Chatsworth was a giant fountain, built to impress Czar Nicholas. It can’t quite match the 300ft (90m) height it once attained, but that too survives. Paxton filled the Crystal Palace Park with fountains, including two capable – on special occasions – of creating 200 ft jets. The series of fountains required the building of a water towers at each end of the Palace. These were themselves nearly 300 ft high, and were designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was commissioned to make 33 lifesized models, completed in 1854, of the (then) newly discovered dinosaurs and other extinct animals in the park. The park was also given a gift of a megatherium skull by Charles Darwin. The rebuilt Crystal Palace was opened by Queen Victoria in June 1854.
The map (north is to the top right corner), shows the layout of the park. G is Crystal Palace Station and the monsters are at N. There were huge fountains at M, rose gardens at I, and the terraces were at D and C, with more fountains and gardens, and with sphinxes. The building itself was at A.
All manor of attractions were laid on over the years, including an early motor show, “The International Horse and Horseless Carriage and Roads Locomotion Exhibition” opened on 2 May 1896 by the Lord Mayor of London. One of the exhibits survives in the National Motor Museum.
In 1911, the Festival of Empire was held at the park and the park was transformed with buildings designed to represent the British Empire. Many of these (temporary) buildings remained at the site until the 1940s.
Crystal Palace Football Club
The Crystal Palace Company invited WG Grace to help them found London County Cricket Club in 1898. You may recall that Frederick Larard took his son Edmund to watch a match.
In the winter, cricketers played football, and Crystal Palace was an inaugural member of the Football Association in 1863. It is only in 2020 that it is becoming acknowledged that this is the same club as exists to this day. The Club’s official Facebook banner now refers to 1861, in preference to the usually quoted foundation date of 1905.
The truth is, as an amateur club, there wasn’t a fixture list, and records are patchy. It did reach the semi-finals of the first ever FA Cup in 1872 but were beaten by the Royal Engineers (also inaugural FA members). The Crystal Palace Company hosted the FA Cup Final from 1895. It now seems clear that the club wanted to make more of their own club, but the FA were not keen about the hosts also owning a competitive club. So as separate company was formed. In 1921, they joined the new Third Division, and were champions in their first year as a league club. This achievement has only otherwise been achieved by Preston North End (winners of the original league) and Small Heath (winners of the new second division in their first season; later Birmingham City FC); and Liverpool and Bury, who each won the Second Division after having won the Lancashire League. Both the FA Cup Finals and Crystal Palace FC games were played at Crystal Palace Park, until the Admiralty requisitioned the Park in WWI. The site of the pitch is now the National Sports Centre.
Crystal Palace have played in every FA Cup competition since 1905, and reached the final twice, in 1990 and 2016. They have played at Selhurst Park since 1924, about halfway along that 4 mile walk from the old ground to central Croydon.
