Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (32 page)

Turning to the east for a minute’s walk brings you to the strip of greenery where once the mighty Palace stood. Pace out its length, all 1,800 feet of it, then stop to survey the scene. You’ll see plenty of green but no sign of a greenhouse. No surprises there, but I had hoped to spot the remains of a few foundations or something to suggest that this patch of lawn had once been the site of one of the capital’s great structures. All you can do is close your eyes and try to imagine what it must have been like to stand on this very spot on 1 May 1851, when the Crystal Palace finally opened to the public.

According to the historian Lord Macaulay, Paxton’s wondrous creation was ‘a most gorgeous sight; vast; graceful; beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances. I cannot think that the Caesars ever exhibited a more splendid spectacle’. To get in on day one you had to splash out on a season ticket: three guineas for blokes, two for the ladies, around £225 and £150 respectively in today’s money. Entry on days two and three was a little more affordable at £1 per person, but still a small fortune for most Londoners. It wasn’t until 26 May, a full 25 days after the grand opening, that the hoi polloi were allowed in for a shilling, and there was plenty of speculation in the press about how they’d behave once they got there, as Henry Mayhew remarked: ‘For many days before the “shilling people” were admitted to the building, the great topic of conversation was the probable behaviour of the people. Would they come sober? Will they destroy the things? Will they want to cut their names on the panes of the glass lighthouses?’ As it turned out, most people behaved themselves pretty well. A month after it opened, on 6 June, Charlotte Brontë paid a visit. I’m guessing the esteemed author of
Jane Eyre
didn’t trash the place, and nor did any of the other visitors she encountered, as she later told her father in a letter: ‘The multitude filling the great aisles seemed ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from a distance.’

I won’t trouble you with all the facts and figures surrounding this legendary event but here are a few of the highlights. The show included 112,000 separate exhibits, divided into 30 different classes of item. A glance at the original Exhibition catalogue reveals that one minute you might be admiring the world’s biggest diamond - ‘the Great Diamond of Runjeet Singh, called “Koh-I-Noor” or Mountain of Light’ - the next you could be scrutinising samples of guano or seagull poo. There were paintings and sculptures, machinery and weapons, costumes and curios from all corners of the earth: something, in fact, for everyone. During the six months it was open to the public it received more than six million visitors, about the same number as turned up for the Millennium Dome, which was open for a whole year. The figure is even more impressive when you remember that the total population of Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition was only around 21 million.

Refreshments were provided by Messrs Schweppe, who supplied more than a million bottles of soft drinks and nearly two million buns during the months the Exhibition ran in Hyde Park. The Exhibition also marked a notable first which would probably have come as a relief to those who polished off all that pop. A chap called George Jennings, manufacturer of water closets, set up London’s first public conveniences - the so-called Retiring Rooms - which were enjoyed by more than 827,000 visitors over the course of the Exhibition. Just imagine the queues. A penny was enough to pay not only for a comfortable sit-down, but also a towel and comb and even a polish of your boots. The euphemism ‘spending a penny’ originated from Jennings’ loos.

The show was a triumph. It generated receipts of £522,000 and a profit of £186,437, which was used to buy the plot of land in South Kensington where London’s great museums were later built. Many of the exhibits themselves later went on display in the new Victoria and Albert Museum, where you can still see them today, alongside Paxton’s famous scrap of blotting paper, without which the whole show might never have happened.

Once the last visitor had been ushered out of the building, there was just one more small question to attend to. How do you dispose of the world’s biggest greenhouse? Some people, including Paxton, wanted to leave it in Hyde Park, a reasonable enough plan, you might think, in view of how successful the show had been. Others wanted to see the back of the building. Our old friend Colonel Sibthorpe, who’d opposed the Exhibition from the start, stepped into the fray once more, arguing that the Palace was ‘a transparent humbug and a bauble’ and should be demolished immediately. Parliament was persuaded and the contractors who had put the whole thing up, a company called Fox and Henderson, were just preparing to knock it all down and sell it for scrap when Paxton and a consortium of businessmen cooked up a new scheme to save the Palace from the clutches of the demolition squad. They persuaded Parliament to sell them the building on a buyer-to-collect basis. Their plan involved relocating the building to a new site, where it would be rebuilt and fitted out in even grander style than the original to become the world’s first theme park.

Paxton and his pals, imaginatively styling themselves the Crystal Palace Company, raised half a million quid from investors, upwards of £35 million in today’s money, to pay for the scheme, which would see the Palace travel, lock stock and barrel-vaulted ceilings, south to Sydenham Hill, a leafy countryside retreat 20 miles away from Hyde Park itself. That’s an awful long way to transport thousands of tons of glass and iron, especially in the days before motorised transport. The job was done by a fleet of horse-drawn carts, rattling their way along the roughly cobbled streets and bumpy country lanes which linked the heart of the city to the country estate at Sydenham.

Having failed to track down any substantial traces of the Palace in Hyde Park, I decided to make a rare foray over the Thames and into south London in my quest for crystal. I opted against a horse-drawn cart and took the train instead, winding my way from Waterloo and through the suburbs of south London. Half an hour later, I arrived at Crystal Palace Station, a stop-off purpose-built to cater for visitors to the new and improved attraction, which said hello to the public for a second time on 10 June 1854. The original plan had been to open in May, but that was scuppered when someone pointed out that the new statues of naked men which adorned the interior of the Palace might be considered too anatomically accurate for the delicate sensibilities of the Victorian public. Only after their privates had been removed or covered with fig leaves - the statues’, not the visitors’ - was it considered safe to start selling tickets.

By coincidence, my first port of call as I left the station at Crystal Palace and headed out into the park was another statue: a giant bust of Paxton himself, still standing sentinel over his former domain. Like just about everything else in this story, it’s built on a larger-than-life scale: even his sideburns are almost as tall as me, and when you add on the height of the pedestal he’s perched on, the whole edifice must be more than 20 feet high. Thank goodness he isn’t wearing a top hat as well, or the whole thing would pose a serious hazard to low-flying aircraft. Today Paxton’s gaze is directed down the slope of the park towards the south-east, which means his reward for putting this place on the map is a glorious view of Penge for the rest of eternity. Meanwhile, his back is turned to the spot at the top of the hill where his mighty Palace once stood until it was destroyed in a fire which lit up the sky for miles around on the night of Monday, 30 November 1936. Today a mound covered by trees and shrubs marks the last burial place of the charred remnants of Paxton’s marvellous building.

I head up the hill towards the mound and amble along the remains of the Italian Terraces, ornate walkways which once heaved with visitors, but today are all but deserted. Ahead of me, a lone walker pauses to take in the view while his jaunty Jack Russell cocks a leg on a plinth which supports a statuesque sphinx, the last exotic survivor of the decorations which adorned this section of the walk when the park was in its pomp. It’s difficult in such circumstances to conjure up a sense of the glitz and glamour which once made it so special, but my eye is soon drawn by another survivor from the original structure, which brings to mind waterworks of a more impressive style and scale.

A year after the park itself opened, Paxton unveiled a new attraction: two mighty water towers designed by Paxton’s pal Brunel powered water down the hill to feed a series of fountains scattered through the landscaped gardens which surrounded the building itself. These twin edifices - each 85 metres tall - supported tanks containing 1,200 tons of water each, which could be released to surge through a network of pipes at a rate of 120,000 gallons a minute. Once the deluge had reached its destination, it spouted to the surface from one of more than 11,000 jets. Old black-and-white photos of the fountains in action reveal that they were a very impressive sight, like a whole series of watery palm trees, reaching hundreds of feet into the south London sky.

Between the wars, John Logie Baird, the man who invented TV as we know it, set up a workshop in the south tower here and made some of the very first TV transmissions anywhere in the world. But when the Second World War broke out, the authorities decided Brunel’s towers would provide a convenient landmark for German bombers as they navigated their way towards targets in the capital, so they were demolished. I have to admit this seems a little random to me, given that they didn’t try to add to the confusion by camouflaging the Thames or painting a colourful rural mural on the side of the Houses of Parliament. The north tower was blown up in a single Fred Dibnah-style explosion, the south tower was picked apart brick by brick for fear of damaging surrounding structures. That’s why the base of the south tower can still be seen in the park today.

Next door to the tower is a small museum full of things that help you to get a sense of what the place looked like in its early years - paintings, photographs and, better still, the curator, a highly knowledgeable man called Ken Kiss, who offers to show me one of the park’s best-kept secrets, an underground treasure which is off bounds today to all but a fortunate few.

As we head back up the hill towards it, Ken tells me how, within a few years of opening, the Crystal Palace was pulling in more than two million visitors a year to this previously remote and rural area beyond the city’s boundaries. In the early years of the park, two new railway lines were built to cater for all the visitors who flooded here. Along the routes of those new lines there was a boom in house-building, which created many of the south London suburbs I’d passed through on my own journey to the park. The first line ends up at Crystal Palace Station; the second line, built by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, came to a halt at the north-west tip of the park, on what is still known today as Crystal Palace Parade. This second station disappeared many moons ago, but the underground subway that funnelled visitors from platform to Palace lives on beneath the rumbling streets of the modern city. These days it’s out of bounds to the public for safety reasons, unless you know the man with the key to this hidden chamber of secrets. And I do.

It doesn’t look much from the outside - a slightly bedraggled courtyard sprouting with weeds leads on towards an archway of bricks, which frames a gloomy cavern beyond. Once we reach the entrance, I peer into the darkness for a moment, before stepping inside. It’s a few moments before my eyes adjust to the low light and I begin to see why Ken was so keen to show me this place. When the park was in its pomp, more than 8,000 visitors per hour would have passed through this walkway en route to their big day out. It may have been built for a functional purpose, but that didn’t stop the Victorian railway engineers who built it from pulling out all the stops when they designed this link between the workaday world of trains and platforms and the wonderland that lay beyond.

I begin to spot pillars, spreading out in all directions from where I stand. They leave the paved stone floor as slender columns but grow wider as they reach towards the roof to create a vaulted ceiling 25 or 30 feet above my head, maybe more. The pillars and ceiling were built of the same patterned red-and-cream brick which was used in the old St Pancras Hotel in King’s Cross, but it’s not that familiar landmark they remind me of. I’m standing in a south London subway, but it feels more like a miniature Moorish palace. For the first time today, I’m able to make the imaginative leap back in time to the days when this place echoed with the footsteps of all those excited Victorian day-trippers, surging from the trains and on towards the marvellous sights that lay beyond the turnstiles, just a shilling away. No one needed to make this place look as good as it did, but it was all part of the show. They did things with style back then, and this was a suitably grand entrance to the grand old park.

Buoyed up by this glimpse of the magnificent entrance, I banish all thoughts of my earlier arrival at the modern-day Crystal Palace Station and of the canine barbarian doing his worst to the statue of the sphinx. Instead I stride off to explore the rest of the park with a new spring in my step. It’s shortly after this that I stumble across the dinosaurs.

Ah yes, those dinosaurs. Here they come at last, trundling over the horizon and into my story. You’ll find them down at the bottom of the hill, grazing peacefully on a series of small islands in the centre of a placid lake. They haven’t moved from here since they settled in the park in the 1850s, which will probably confirm what you might already have begun to suspect: these unlikely survivors are not flesh, blood and bone, but man-made creatures. Today, while almost everything else from those early days has disappeared completely or decayed into shabby old age, they still look in surprisingly good nick - helped, no doubt, by a recent £4 million makeover.