Brightening the future with heritage from the past: Crystal Palace Park Trust is making important progress in updating the 170-year-old park. Pic: HTA Design
A charitable foundation has made a grant of half-a-million pounds to the Crystal Palace Park Trust towards the historic park’s regeneration projects.
“The grant, over two years, will support work to preserve and regenerate historic features and landscapes within Crystal Palace Park, including conservation of the Grade I-listed Crystal Palace Dinosaurs,” the Park Trust announced today.
The money is coming from the Garfield Weston Foundation which, since it was established in 1958, has made donations of more than £1.5billion. In the most recent financial year, the Foundation gave more than £100million to nearly 1,800 charities across the country.
Preservation order: iguanodons, two of the Crystal Palace Park Dinosaurs to be conserved
The world-famous Crystal Palace dionsaur statues – of dinosaurs, prehistoric marine animals and more – were the world’s first full-scale, 3D representations of prehistoric creatures when they were unveiled in 1854 – making Crystal Palace the first “Jurassic Park”.
“They are both unique and scientifically important, as well as a much-loved part of our ongoing fascination with prehistoric life,” the Crystal Palace Park Trust said today in announcing the significant donation towards their preservation.
“Their planned conservation work should see them removed from Historic England’s Heritage At Risk Register and saved for future generations to enjoy.”
The Garfield Weston grant will also support renovation of the park’s Geological Court and Tidal Lakes – the landscape surrounding the prehistoric models – as well as the creation of a new Visitor Centre housing interpretation and displays telling the story of Crystal Palace Park, a heritage trail around the park and a dinosaur-themed playground.
The grant is in addition to the £5million received from The National Lottery Heritage Fund last year towards this phase of the Crystal Palace Park regeneration, as well as grants from the Wolfson Foundation, Pilgrim Trust and the London Marathon Foundation.
Thankful: Victoria Pinnington, CEO of the Crystal Palace Park Trust
Victoria Pinnington, the Park Trust’s CEO, said: “We’re so thankful to receive such significant support from the Garfield Weston Foundation. The regeneration of the park is a transformational project, and we’re grateful to the Foundation for recognising the benefits this will bring, not only to the heritage of our site but also to all our visitors from across south London and beyond.”
And Duncan Wilson, Historic England’s chief exec, said: “The Garfield Weston Foundation’s generous investment in Crystal Palace Park is very welcome, particularly as it will support the conservation of the internationally important Dinosaurs – as Sir David Attenborough put it, ‘This is where public outreach of science began’.
“We placed these unique sculptures on the Heritage at Risk Register in 2020 because of our concerns about their structural stability and deterioration. Thorough investigations by Historic England and partners to understand these issues have laid the groundwork for new comprehensive repairs so that these world-famous beasts can be loved for longer.”
The restoration and reopening of Crystal Palace Subway, the first element of the ambitious park-wide regeneration scheme, was completed in September 2024 and has won a prestigious National Railway Heritage Award for best partnership project.
The next stage of restoration and regeneration work will begin this spring.
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(a long answer..)
The stated funds seem to be for beneficial and appropriate park uses.
However this is against a background of past, present and future proposals for, or actual damage, neglect and detriment to CPP.
The ‘dinosaurs’ were renovated with Heritage Lottery Funds, including other works, some dubious, around the year 2000 with just over £3m I recall.
Bromley Council then failed to maintain the meticulously researched and repaired statues. The paint peeled off revealing the underlying concrete-like material, and then algae grew on them.
This is a problem with one off, capital projects – there is no money, or no will, to maintain the ‘investment’.
Despite having passed over the ownership and maintenance of CPP under a long lease (125 years) to the Council-invented CPP Trust, Bromley Council is well advanced in the remaining part-funding of the Trust by selling off Grade II* Registered Historic Parkland for around 6 blocks of flats comprising 210 private units.
The (latest) Masterplan is for that land sale, tree felling and habitat removal not only on the proposed building sites, but also for yet another park redesign.
The most prominent part of that redesign involves felling 170+ trees (source: The CP Foundation) on the hilltop ridge between the bus terminus and the TV Mast, and also down the Anerley Hill edge and below the TV Mast towards the National Sports Centre (NSC).
This follows previous part-implemented phases of other masterplans which felled hundreds more trees.
Even the improvement work undertaken by Bromley Council after inheriting CPP in 1986, after dissolution of the GLC, is to be destroyed.
This includes the triple avenue of plane trees marking the aisle of the former CP, the ‘CP Arch’ gardens by the bus terminus, and trees and wildlife habitat on the hilltop.
LB Bromley wants to remove its c £600k public funding (around 2005 accounts) and have accountability be replaced by the now established CPP Trust.
LBB has been fought against for its massive commercial development proposals since 1990 for variously
– the Al-Houda Kuwaiti-backed hotel and leisure complex,
– a London and Regional Property / UCI 20-screen multiplex with 950 space rooftop car park,
– a ZhongRong Group Shanghai property company hotel.
This now reverts to a much-altered version of the (abolished) London Development Agency / Latz Und Partner masterplan for blocks of flats – but with more flats and fewer ‘benefits’.
The CPP Trust is an originally selected (by Bromley Council) group of, now 11 Trustees who then get to select any replacements needed over the next 125 years.
The usual provisions and safeguards of local democracy and accountability for this major historic public park have gone.
Without public funding, the park income, apart from this and any other donations, is due to come from the 210-unit flats development and park land sale, and commercial hire of the park, which events reduce park access, and include concerts which are noisy and disruptive to the park and environs.