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...

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...

Today I visited Electric House, an intricately designed Grade II-listed building which originally housed the County Borough of Croydon electricity showrooms. Electric House sign caught by the sun, August 2017 The building has recently been renovated, however rather than becoming apartments like so many other Croydon buildings, it is now a campus of London South Bank University. The courses available are in the medical fields of adult nursing, mental health nursing and chiropractic, plus business. The first students began their courses in 2021 and next week a larger cohort will join the campus. It's great that central Croydon is home to this campus providing much-needed nurses to our NHS. The nursing students undertake placements all over London, plus south of Croydon down to the Gatwick area.   Main entrance It's difficult to find a lot of information or photos of electricity showrooms. I remember visiting Amberley Museum in West Sussex many years ago and seeing a sort of elec...