Crystal Palace Park

While the Crystal Palace is no longer there, the 200-acre park is a lasting reminder of the grandeur of the scheme. There is a wide range of things to see and do, including a hedge maze, a sports centre with Olympic-sized pool, a boating lake, fishing, an athletics stadium and an open air concert bowl by a lake among other things. The park is a great place for a walk and also for cycling around. A significant attraction within the park is the Dinosaur Park. Large Victorian concrete and cast iron dinosaurs are scattered around widely. The dinosaurs, built by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in the early 1850s to meet the emerging passion of wealthy Victorians for fossils and paleontology, they predated Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by six years and were unique in the world. After falling into a state of disrepair in the 1980s and 1990s, they were splendidly renovated using a Lottery grant in the early 2000s and are now protected as a grade I listed structure. The dinosaurs were designed by the Victorians on their idea of what one would look like and differ somewhat from modern interpretations.

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