Escarpment
Crystal Palace Park being blessed with the highest wooded ridge in south London is seen as offering strategic viewpoints and forming a major skyline ridge,. The visual benefits of this open space and greenery merit protection since it provides a break in the urban fabric and a green spine in our built environment.
The photographs are of a physical space and have been taken to express and record the beauty, which can be seen here. A natural beauty of views with tranquillity which is threatened with development. The area once known as part of a hanging wood is at the top of Crystal Palace Park, in the suburb of Bromley, south east of London, England. The history of this area can be traced back many centuries with the ridge, falling away steeply on both sides forming the spine of the escarpment. Used once as walkway, now a road, the ridge rises at Deptford, reaching a high point at Crystal Palace to fall away at Streatham.
The area of the park was once common land and part of The Great North Wood. However it passed into private ownership and was renamed Penge Place. Penge Place later being bought by Joseph Paxton, to become the new site and grounds for the building to house the Great Exhibition.
Initially the Great Exhibition was erected in Hyde Park in 1850. The building named the “Crystal Palace” was Paxton’s great engineering achievement in glass and metal. Its move from Hyde Park to the site on the ridge took place in 1854 when the building was enlarged, and was to remain here for the next eighty-four years.
It was in 1934, when the whole skyline of this area was lit as the glass and steel building burnt to the ground. The end of an era was over. This top site of the park was left mostly to nature with small piecemeal developments and maintenance taking place, such as the siting and re-siting of the camp-site and planting of a small avenue of Spanish Plane Trees. The site has also seen the erection of the 720 foot Crystal Palace television mast, now a local landmark. Only the crumbling Upper and Lower Terraces of landscaping from the Great Exhibition remain as also the haunting name of “Crystal Palace”.
Photographs of Crystal Palace Park have been accepted by Google Maps. Most of the photographs have enjoyed viewings in the 10’s however Public Park Not For Sale has had over 700 viewings but not one comment has emerged. This makes the internet seem a very intense but silent space.