The Unexpected Beauty of Croydon

Crystal Palace Park is a fascinating place with over 170 years of history, since it was selected as the new home for the building that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. I have plans for a series of blog posts about this site because there's so much to cover and I have a huge number of photos. While the park sits in the London Borough of Bromley, it's right on the boundary of Croydon, Lambeth, Bromley, Southwark and Lewisham.  To cut a long story very short, Crystal Palace Park opened in 1854, and the Crystal Palace itself sadly burned down in 1936. The park still has a variety of attractions, including lifesize models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, an outdoor concert venue, several lakes, a maze and a large sports centre. Last year park management was handed over to the Crystal Palace Park Trust , a charity with big ambitions for the site. They are securing funding to restore parts of the park, including the dinosaurs. Current Crystal Palace train station Curr...

Great crested grebes are one of my favourite birds and I want to tell you about them. They can be found in Croydon, but generally only at South Norwood Lake and sometimes at South Norwood Country Park. Their survival to the present day is partly down to the efforts of a group of Croydon women. 1. The Great Crested Grebe was an inspiration for the establishment of the RSPB The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk was founded in 1889 in Croydon, meeting at the home of Eliza Phillips, on Morland Road. In 1891, they merged with the Plumage League, based in Didsbury, Manchester. Both groups had been set up to try to prevent the extinction of birds due to hunting for their feathers for women's hats. One of the species that was suffering was the great crested grebe, as they have beautiful head crests. The efforts of the group were successful in getting plume hunting banned and great crested grebes were saved from extinction, which I am very grateful for. 2. They are excellent underwater swimmers but...

I've been meaning to start a series of blog posts about places where you can walk across the boundaries of Croydon through or between green spaces. As I collect lists of bird species for the Croydon RSPB, it is important to me to know where the borough boundaries are, and being something of a geography nerd I already do know a lot of them and there are quite a few pretty places on the boundaries.  When I was a young child, I lived in Lambeth, not far from Streatham Common. I have memories of crisp winter walks around Christmas and picking blackberries in the summer holidays.  These days I live in Croydon, but the 468 bus connects me with familiar places from my childhood. If you get off at the stop Biggin Hill (not to be confused with the airport in Kent), you can cross the road and take a look at Beulah Hill Pond. It's quite small and it's got a metal fence around it but I saw four mallards and two moorhens there. It was apparently used historically for horses and cattle t...