The Unexpected Beauty of Croydon

For a child who's seen Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park must seem a bit of a let down, since they are made of concrete and can't move. Personally, I'd rather live near them than the dinosaurs of Isla Nublar.  Iguanadons and Hylaeosaurus (on right), April 2023 Birds are now considered to be dinosaurs , so I suppose it's appropriate that they live among the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park. I am an avid birder and many of my photos of the dinosaurs include birds on or around them. The theme of this blog post will be the way the dinosaurs blend into their environment and are integrated into the habitat by local wildlife.  Some facts about the dinosaurs: Most of them are not strictly dinosaurs, but they're all based on real prehistoric creatures They were created on site by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, with scientific advice from Sir Richard Owen They were based on the best knowledge available at the time, but in some cases there was quite a lot of ar...

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...

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...

On the Surrey National Golf Course in Caterham, a little south of Croydon, there is an unusual feature: the somewhat overgrown burial ground from St Lawrence's Hospital. While Caterham-on-the-Hill is mostly housing now, until the 1990s it was home to military barracks and a large mental hospital, which was formerly an asylum. The patients were those which we would today consider to have learning disabilities.  I had read that the burial ground had been located on the golf course but I wasn't sure how accessible it would be. I took a 466 bus to the Tesco at Caterham-on-the-Hill and walked through a residential estate for about 10 minutes until I reached the end of Drake Avenue, where it meets Fairbourne Lane. There I found the entrance to the public bridleway which crosses the golf course. After walking along a track with high hedges both sides, I found a gate on my right, with a sign on it informing me it was St Lawrence's Burial Ground, inviting me to "enjoy the peace...