The regeneration of one of the most storied parks in London has been mooted for decades. In this Spotlight on Arts & Humanities we focus on a King’s project, led by Dr Chris Manias, that looks how to give new life to the park's most famous residents - dinosaurs.
In August 2024, plans for a £17.5 million regeneration of the Crystal Palace Park in south London were approved by Bromley Council. Delivered in partnership with the Crystal Palace Park Trust, and led by HTA Design, this major project will aim to improve the park’s amenities, increase accessibility and see many of the park’s original Victorian features restored.
Notable amongst these is the Geological Court which, since 1854, has been home to a famous set of residents – the ‘Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’. The refurbishment of the Court will help to facilitate vital restoration work to these iconic Grade I listed mid-nineteenth-century sculptures, but also draw attention to the site’s lesser-known features, including models of extinct mammals and a series of 14 ‘Geological Illustrations’ of rock strata that were designed by David T. Ansted, Professor of Geology at King’s between 1840 and 1853.
A King’s project, Crystal Palace Park: Beyond the Dinosaurs, saw Dr Chris Manias from the Department of History collaborate with the charity Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (FCPD) to elevate the experiences of those visiting the Geological Court and highlight the integrity of those features which have tended to be overlooked by visitors.
We're keen to use the Court to help visitors think through bigger questions - how does science work, and what is the relationship between art and science? And how can we visualize both lost worlds of extinct animals, and long-term geological change? In our current context, where science is a contested part of public debate, and where thinking about long-term environmental change is so important to our understandings of the climate crisis and drives to sustainability, then thinking about how people have dealt with these questions and issues in the past can be an important source of reflection and engagement.
Dr Chris Manias
By doing so, the project sought to expand FCPD’s outreach which, until now, has focused on foregrounding the dinosaurs themselves and appealing to children and families. Taken as a whole, the Geological Court has much to tell us about mid-nineteenth-century scientific knowledge and bids to ‘edu-tain’ the public, and in turn prompts important questions about our understanding of the earth today.
View of “Secondary Island” in Crystal Palace Park, including “Iguanodon (lower left), Hylaeosaurus (upper left), and Megalosaurus. Image: Courtesy FCPD
Bigger than dinosaurs?
Dr Manias has a deep scholarly interest in the public role of palaeontological sciences and sought to address the Court’s geological features by developing resources illuminating the less well-known aspects of the site aimed at adult audiences. This initiative complemented FCPD’s PaleoPlanting Community Project (ongoing since 2018), which has seen the cultivation of a diverse array of vegetation appropriate for different geologic ages by a dedicated team of volunteers, thereby honouring the Geological Court’s original horticultural features.
The project is designed to try and take away the plants that shouldn’t be here and plant it back in a way, as close as we can, to how the plants would have been at the time of the dinosaurs.
Volunteer speaking on the PaleoPlanting Community Project
I think it will make the island look like how the Victorians imagined it to look.
Volunteer speaking on the PaleoPlanting Community Project
In 2022, Dr Manias and Dr Jennifer Crees, a palaeontologist and FCPD Trustee who worked as the project research assistant, oversaw the organisation and development of the project. In order to ensure that the materials produced would be well suited to the needs and interests of their target audiences, they first conducted a series of in-person and online surveys of park visitors. In June 2022, a research workshop and public event was held at King’s, which concentrated on planning the content for these resources. Dr Manias, Dr Crees, and other stakeholders then produced a series of illustrated guide sheets focusing respectively on ‘Mammal Sculptures,’ ‘Geological Illustrations’ and ‘Paleoplants,’ to be accompanied by audio-guides.
The guide sheets, now available on the FCPD website and distributed at FCPD events, take visitors through the various features of the site and provide further information about their historic, ecological and evolutionary significance. They encourage extensive engagement with previously neglected aspects of the site, and help set these within larger discussions around biodiversity, ecology, evolution, climate change, and deep time.
For Crystal Palace residents, it's a major landmark and source of pride, to have these unparalleled historic objects in the local park. But the site also has a global importance, as the first significant attempt to reconstruct prehistoric animals in a life-sized scale. So the large communities of science and palaeontology enthusiasts around the world look on it as a really important icon in the history of our understanding of prehistoric animals and deep time. We’re really excited that now the project has been given the green light, that more and more people will be able to engage with them for years to come.
Dr Chris Manias
This project was funded by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King's.
