I alighted from perhaps the grandest suburban station in London: Crystal Palace. Those stylish colonnades, that refined brickwork, that spacious ticket office, those seductive arches!

The station remains the last gateway to a monument which, more than any other, reminds me of those lines in Edgar Alan Poe’s poem to Sappho:

The glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome. 

To which might be added the splendour that was British Empire – or at least it might have seemed such in the politically incorrect age of the Victorians.

This vast palace was made of glass and iron. It stood on one of the highest points in the capital with views towards the City to the north and Kent and Surrey to the south. It housed collections of objects from all parts of the empire: the world: the farthest pacific islands, the jewel in the crown that was India, the iciest parts of Canada. Handelian music resounded from huge choirs, visiting dignitaries, like Garibaldi, orated to crowds.

Below the transcendental palace stretched wide Italian style terraces opening onto pleasure gardens where fountains played, guests lost themselves in a complex maze and couples romanced under leafy arbours.

Alas, the palace is gone, destroyed in 1936 in a massive fire seen over much of London.

But the park is still there although fountains no longer play and the statuary has departed. Miraculously the dinosaurs on their geological islands in the south of the park survive to this day, unlike their Jurassic era forbears. They were, indeed, in danger of disappearing as a Facebook friend remarks: ‘I remember playing amongst the dinosaurs before they were renovated – it was all a great big jungle with broken dinos in there‘.

A series of sculptures designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of geologist Sir Richard Owen and inaugurated in 1854 the dinosaurs became a highlight when the palace moved from South Kensington, where it had housed the 1861 Great Exhibition, to Sydenham. They remain a highlight. Indeed, an old school friend notes ‘The first time I went to Crystal Palace Park I did not know about the dinosaurs. I nearly passed out with surprise!’ 

I, too, remember my astonishment at seeing these monsters from a primaeval epoch for the first time. Crystal Palace park remains for me a haunt of memory and desire: the memory of bygone times with friends and desire for those intangible dreams of our childhood.

Its dinosaurs represent fifteen different genera of extinct animals not all of which are dinosaurs. (For example the giant Irish elk, one of which has unfortunately broken antlers).

They were realised with the early palaeontological knowledge of the Victorians and consequently many of them are scientifically inaccurate. For example, the Ichthyosaurus is shown as being crocodile-like. However, today it is considered to be more like a shark with dorsal fin and fish-tail.

It doesn’t matter, however, if the monsters are examples more of nineteenth-century misinterpretation than of accurate representations of the extraordinary species that once ruled the earth: they are fascinating in their own right.

I left the monsters with their fearless company of waterfowl and headed towards the expansive Italian terraces made up of a lower and upper level.

Pairs of sphinxes punctuate both ends of these elegant structures which formed the southern approach to the great palace and illustrate just how huge it was.

I gazed upon the ruins of what had been and Shelley’s lines from ‘Ozymandias’ came to mind

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

From here it was a short walk to the bus terminal on the parade. Just in time to avoid being drenched from yet another torrential outburst of the skies!

PS I recollect reading an evocative description of a child visiting the Crystal Palace in Michael Sadleir’s novel ‘Fanny by Gaslight.’ Here is a passage from it:

“We wandered under the vast arcading of the Palace, staring at statues and costumes in glass cases and models of engines and triumphs of ornament in porcelain, gilt and ormolu. We went on the tiny railway and fed the ducks on the pond, and stared at the crowds.”

If I could time travel I might not wish to select Athens at the time of Pericles or Rome when Marcus Aurelius was emperor but rather the Crystal palace when Victoria was Queen.