This blog post is going to be all about how much we love Crystal Palace Park! (No, I'm not talking about Crystal Palace's football ground, Selhurst Park, although this seems to be a common misunderstanding amongst people we have been talking to about it!).
Crystal Palace Park is somewhere I had wanted to go for a while. One of my friends had recommended it to me and we were not disappointed. This park has it all! The park was built in the Victorian era for cultural and sporting events and those Victorians certainly knew how to build a park. It used to be home to the actual Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition (which you may have learnt about at school). However this beautiful building was sadly burnt down in 1936. The only thing that remains of the Palace now is the large number of steps leading up to where the palace once stood. According to the internet a Chinese billionaire is planning on rebuilding the whole palace exactly how it was. I’m not 100% sure how true this is but I hope it does happen!
Crystal Palace Park is somewhere I had wanted to go for a while. One of my friends had recommended it to me and we were not disappointed. This park has it all! The park was built in the Victorian era for cultural and sporting events and those Victorians certainly knew how to build a park. It used to be home to the actual Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition (which you may have learnt about at school). However this beautiful building was sadly burnt down in 1936. The only thing that remains of the Palace now is the large number of steps leading up to where the palace once stood. According to the internet a Chinese billionaire is planning on rebuilding the whole palace exactly how it was. I’m not 100% sure how true this is but I hope it does happen!
Anyway, the palace isn’t the only thing the Victorians built in this park; they did like to do things in style. There still remains a fantastic maze, which is probably one of the best mazes I have ever been in, even better than the one at Hampton Court. We did worry at one point that we would be lost in the maze forever, as we spent about fifteen minutes walking around in circles. It really is great fun, and even better, it’s completely free!
Then lastly and probably my favorite thing about the park was the dinosaurs. Not your normal dinosaurs, no! Victorian interpretations of what they thought dinosaurs might look like. They were made by the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins who completed them in 1854, to show off the then newly discovered dinosaurs and other extinct animals in the park. The dinosaurs don’t really look that much like what we would imagine them to look like now. They actually look more like giant lizards, which we thought made it even better.
Overall, Crystal Palace Park is a fantastic day out and if you live around London you should most certainly go. Along with all the exciting things I have mentioned above, the whole park is lovely if you just fancy a nice walk in the sunshine.
Liz
x
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