Sydenham

Medicinal wells, then the Crystal Palace for eighty-two years, then the fire that took it.

The water came first. Springs found here in the 1640s were held to be medicinal, twelve wells were opened, and John Evelyn rode out in 1675 to see waters he wrote were much frequented in summer. George III came later. The wells lie under Sydenham Wells Park now and still run, and they are the reason a village on a hill in Kent became a place Londoners travelled to at all. What came next was larger. Paxton's Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, was taken down and put up again on the hill above here in a bigger form, and Queen Victoria opened it in June 1854 in front of forty thousand people. Two railways were run up to it and the streets below filled with villas: Sydenham became a suburb because of a building. On the night of 30 November 1936 it burned, and the glow was seen from eight counties. None of it was rebuilt. What survives is stranger than a ruin would have been. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's concrete dinosaurs of 1854 still stand among the trees in the park, wrong in almost every anatomical particular and protected for it. Up the hill, Sydenham Hill Wood holds the largest surviving piece of the Great North Wood, with the track bed of the high level railway running through it to a sealed tunnel that bats use now.

Photo by Stacey Harris, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons