by Suggs
The display you can see today is impressive enough, but Owen and Hawkins had originally planned something even more dramatic. Besides building more dinosaurs, they intended that the artificial lake in which their islands were situated should rise and fall as though the tide was coming in and out, revealing or submerging different parts of the display according to the time of day. In the event, the cash ran out before the design could be implemented and today the water levels are fixed. Only the ducks who paddle on the pond know what murky prehistoric survivors are lurking beneath the surface here.
There’s an interesting postscript to the story of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Hawkins was blamed for pushing the project over budget and decided to try his luck in pastures new. A few years later he surfaced in New York, where he was commissioned to build a new set of dinosaurs to go on display in Central Park. By now, many more fossilised remains had been discovered, which meant that the New York examples Hawkins created were far more accurate than the London prototypes. Instead of the chunky, bulky elephants on steroids I saw grazing in Crystal Palace Park, the drawings of his New York creations show a far more anatomically accurate set of creatures, with elegant long necks and slender limbs. There are no misplaced digits gracing the noses of this impressive collection. But if you happen to find yourself in New York these days, don’t bother to go dinosaur hunting in its great park. It seems that Hawkins had a falling out with some of the city’s corrupt politicians, including the notorious William Magear ‘Boss’ Tweed. Anyone with a passing interest in American politics - or, indeed, with the classic 1970s series The Dukes of Hazard - will know that it is always a bad idea to pick a quarrel with a man whose nickname is ‘Boss’. Sadly, Hawkins did exactly that and paid the ultimate price. Tweed despatched a gang of his finest thugs to break into Hawkins’ workshop and trash his dinosaurs. I don’t think he woke up with a megalosaurus head in his bed, but he certainly got the message not to mess with Mr Tweed and left the city soon afterwards. It’s said that today their remains are still buried somewhere in Central Park, lying in wait to confuse the archaeologists of the future.
The Crystal Palace dinosaurs may have topped the bill when the park first opened, but, over the years, they found themselves upstaged by a string of other new attractions. In 1864, for example, a pneumatic railway was built, which enabled visitors to enjoy a 600-yard trip down a brick tunnel in a railway carriage which was sucked through the tunnel at a speed of 25mph by a vacuum-creating steam engine. I’m not sure I understand the physics, but I can’t think of many better ways to spend a sixpence.
The park continued to offer Londoners a big day out right through to the early years of the twentieth century, even staging 20 cup finals between 1895 and 1914 - none of them contested by Chelsea, sadly. But its best days were behind it. During the First World War it was used as a naval supply depot and although it reopened as an amusement attraction in 1920, the end was in sight. The fountains no longer flowered, and the massive fire which finally destroyed the place in 1936 almost came as a relief, putting the tired exhibition out of its misery once and for all.
But still - marvellously, miraculously - the dinosaurs survive. They’ve stood firm through everything the last century or so could throw at them, including the bombs of the Luftwaffe. And they may even live to see a new Crystal Palace rise on the site of the original. If some recent reports I’ve read about in the papers are to be believed, there are plans afoot to try to build a new version of the original.
That’s what I love about London most of all - the sheer resilience of the place and its dauntless capacity for reinvention. So where better to end my journey through the endlessly surprising city I’m proud to call my home than here, a place where even the mighty dinosaurs themselves are still not quite extinct? There they stand, still grazing solemnly in the park that time forgot: the megalosaurus, the ichthyosaurus and the mighty iguanodon himself - still wondering why a so-called expert stuck his thumb on to his forehead, and still waiting patiently for the tide to turn.
Further Reading
This Bright Field William Taylor (Methuen, 2000)
Soho in the Fifties Daniel Farson (Michael Joseph, 1987)
Absolute Beginners Colin MacInnes (MacGibbon & Kee, 1959)
You’re Barred, You Bastards Norman Balon (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991)
Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy Ian Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)
Beau Brummell: His Life and Letters Lewis Melville (Hutchinson, 1924)
London: A Literary Companion Peter Vansittart (John Murray, 1992)
The Horse-World of London W. J. Gordon (Kessinger, [1893] 2008)
London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew (Routledge, [1851] 1967)
The Mysteries of London G. W. M. Reynolds (Keele University Press, [1869] 1996)
Italian Food Elizabeth David (Macdonald, 1954)
Football Grounds of Britain Simon Inglis (Collins Willow, 1987)
Soho Judith Summers (Bloomsbury, 1989)
The London Compendium Ed Glinert (Penguin, 2003)
The London Nobody Knows Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher (Penguin, 1962)
Making the Metropolis Stephen Halliday (Breedon Books, 2003)
England in Particular Sue Clifford and Angela King (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
