If you’ve not been to Crystal Palace Park and seen the dinosaurs then I highly recommend doing so. They’re concrete, life-size and in need of some restoration. By modern standards I guess they’re not that impressive but when you consider they were made 150 years ago – before they even really knew what most of these dinosaurs actually looked like – then I think that makes them all the more impressive. There’s even little information boards showing what we now reckon the animals really looked like and I love they fact they took some pretty dramatic artistic liberties.
The park itself is named after the famed Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park before being dismantled and reconstructed in South London where it sat from 1854 until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The area is also famous for it’s TV transmitter which, at 219 metres, is the fourth tallest structure in London. The park also features in ‘The Italian Job’ in the scene filmed at the athletics track in Crystal Palace sports centre where Michael Caine says “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”. So there you have it. An ode to Crystal Palace.
‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’. So spoke the eponymous hero in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I was in North London on something of a busman’s holiday and decided this was solid advice worth heeding so headed out to do some ‘research’ into Highgate. It somehow yielded this result.
Some interesting facts about Highgate; St Michael’s Church (pictured) is the highest church in London and as you enter the church you are all but level with the cross on the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, there’s literally tons of famous people buried in Highgate Cemetery from Karl Marx and George Michael to Jeremy Beadle and Alexander Litvinchenko, the 18th century farcical oath of ‘Swearing on the Horns’ was traditionally given to visitors at Highgate pubs. If you don’t know about ‘Swearing on the Horns’ you really should check it out…
To celebrate these facts and Highgate in general I’ve produced this image. I think that’s the best explanation I can come up with for its existence. It would be good to have a proper use for it. I should probably get on with some real work…
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