Rory Walsh explores South London’s Victorian vision of prehistoric Britain
Southeast London. August lately over, and a new Prime Minister sitting in Downing Street. Implacable summer weather. As little mud on the ground as if the waters had but wholly retired from the face of the earth, and it’s wonderful to meet a megalosaurus, ten metres long or so, gazing like an elephantine lizard on Sydenham Hill…
Almost 175 years after Charles Dickens wrote the opening of Bleak House, a walk through Crystal Palace Park today invites the above reworking. Dickens imagined a megalosaurus crawling unnoticed through winter mud in his version. The one I’m looking at, a stern green giant with sharp teeth and hunched shoulders, stands proudly on display after Britain’s driest summer.
The megalosauruses are among the biggest of the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs. The 30 or so statues, built just after Bleak House was published, were the world’s first life-sized models of extinct animals.
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When they were unveiled to the public in 1855, the dinosaurs were a sensation. Besides visual spectacle, they were intended to educate Victorian visitors about the emerging science of palaeontology. The statues were placed in a carefully landscaped Geological Court. Winding footpaths still lead around three scenic islands set within a tidal lake. The islands represent scenes from the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, with the statues chronologically arranged to create a ‘walk through Deep Time’.
Alongside them, a set of ‘Geological Illustrations’ showcases Britain’s geological and mineral resources. Massive amounts of quarried rock were transported to the park from across the country, including Yorkshire, the Peak District and the Dorset coast. A bridge overlooks a reproduction stratified cliff, complete with geological faults and a thick seam of coal. Elsewhere are artificial outcrops of chalk and sandstone. Initially, the site had a replica lead mine.
The statues themselves were made in plaster from clay moulds. The larger ones are lined with enough material to build a house. An iguanodon, for example, contains 600 bricks, 900 tiles and more than 30 metres of iron framework. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the noted sculptor who cast them, consulted the latest research to decide what creatures may have looked like. Exquisite details include the complex eyes of the ichthyosaurs and layered fur on the giant ground sloth.
Though known as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, strictly only four of the statues fit the zoological definition — the megalosaurus, a hylaeosaurus and two iguanodons. The others include amphibians, reptiles and various mammals. There were plans to add more, such as a mammoth and a dodo. Spiralling costs, however, meant that in 1855, the park authorities withdrew Hawkins’ funding and work stopped.
Despite the research and craft that went into them, the statues soon became outdated. While some were modelled from well-preserved skeletons, others were based on partial remains and fleshed out by anatomical estimates. Twenty-five years after the park opened, a complete iguanodon skeleton discovered in Belgium revealed that the Crystal Palace pair were highly inaccurate. Infamously, their nose horns should have been thumbs.
As more dinosaurs were found, particularly in the USA, the Crystal Palace statues were rendered obsolete curiosities. They slowly fell into decline. Gravity claimed the hylaeosaurus’s original heavy head. The sloth, depicted holding onto a live tree, lost an arm as the tree grew. Despite renovations in 1952 and 2001, in February 2020 the statues were added to Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. Three months later, the megalosaurus’s nose and jaw broke off.
They had already faced extinction. Crystal Palace Park is named after a destroyed building. The 1851 Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park, central London, in a huge temporary iron and glass structure. Punch magazine called it ‘the Crystal Palace’. The nickname stuck. When the exhibition ended, it was dismantled and then rebuilt on Sydenham Hill. The area has been known as Crystal Palace ever since. On 30 November 1936, the palace burned down.
Ninety years later, summer 2026 saw the Geological Court thoroughly restored as part of Crystal Palace Park’s £5 million regeneration. The statues have been repaired and repainted in their Victorian colours. Young children seeing them shriek with excitement. Adults take photos and read the new information panels. When a pigeon lands on a plesiosaur, everyone smiles. Once cutting-edge geological tools, today the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are unique and fascinating survivors of a lost world.
