Sunday 9th August 2026
In the dim and distant past I lived just across the road from Crystal Palace Park on the very edge of the border with Lewisham. It would be dishonest to say that we often went for strolls in the park in those pre-baby, pre-dog days but we routinely sneaked in via a side entrance for the annual Guy Fawkes fireworks that set all the car alarms off in the car park.
If I'm honest, I'd always regarded the dinosaur sculptures as not all that: naive depictions of the more accurate diagrams in books and TV reconstructions, and I didn't pay them much heed.
One of the perks of being a Councillor is being invited to viewings and openings that are of interest to the Council and it was in this capacity that I went along to the official opening last month of the dinosaur restoration project as a LibDem representative among the usual hosts of Bromley Conservative Councillors.
It was the context of the sculptures given by the speeches that made me think about the restored lead and concrete models in a completely different light.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a natural history artist, created 30 dinosaurs sculptures as part of the Great Exhibition that were installed in the park when it opened in 1854, part of an attempt to educate the general public, a recurrent mission for some of these Victorian visionaries.
Mary Anning had discovered her first complete Plesiosaurus fossil at Lyme Regis in 1923 and Charles Darwin, who lived in Down House now at the other end of our borough, was working on On the Origin of the Species, which he published in 1859. The world's first attempt to depict dinosaurs from fossil evidence must have prompted iconoclastic thinking around established religion and the beginnings of humanity on earth and the discoveries must have been mindblowing in their time. In my view, they still are.
So in this context the dinosaurs represent shocking, revolutionary and new thinking. That they have been there, attempting to educate people of all ages for 172 years has strengthened my respect for them.
The dinosaurs have been cleaned, repaired and restored with the aid of a £5m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the backing of the Crystal Palace Park Trust. Now that the restoration now complete they have been removed from Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register.
It was a real privilege to attend this opening ceremony to hear from and chat with so many knowledgeable and passionate people and I look forward to seeing the complete Crystal Palace Regeneration project as it develops and completes.
Full details on visiting, including accessible routes, are available on the Crystal Palace Park Trust website.
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