North And South Railings, Walls And Boundary Marker

Railings, plinth walls and piers, circa 1854

Two sets of railings survive on the eastern side of Crystal Palace Parade, positioned on either side of where the central transept of the Palace once stood. These are handsome examples of mid-Victorian cast ironwork.

The railings themselves are constructed of cast iron with thick tubular uprights featuring multiple torus mouldings and blunt spear-like finials. These uprights are threaded onto square-sectioned top and bottom rails with heavy bosses at the intersections. Beneath the railings run low plinth walls of stock brick topped with stone coping. Projecting brick pilasters, spaced approximately every three metres, support taller and thicker iron uprights.

The southern railings form a curving run of nine and a half bays, supported by a curved brace at their inner (northern) end and gradually stepping downward towards their outer end, where they attach to the square brick end pier of the subway parapet. The northern railings describe an answering curve before running straight for eight bays and terminating in another square pier. The northernmost three bays of the northern railings have partly collapsed, and only the plinth wall remains of the innermost two bays of the curved section.

A cast-iron boundary post marked 'Camberwell Parish 1870' stands against one of the pilasters. This is a well-preserved and clearly legible example of its type and has group value with the adjoining railings.

The railings marked the middle entrance to the Crystal Palace via the central transept. The original Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, conceived by the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce to educate the British workforce and improve standards of industrial design. After the exhibition closed, Joseph Paxton's vast iron, glass and timber structure was dismantled and its components reused to construct a second, larger palace set on the slopes of Sydenham Hill, well beyond London's outer edge. This new Palace opened in 1854 under a revised design by Paxton with input from architects Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones, developed by the private Crystal Palace Company. It housed permanent displays illustrating natural history and the development of civilisation, as well as a theatre, concert hall, commercial showrooms and shopping bazaar. Crystal Palace Parade, a broad new avenue, gave access to the Palace via three entrances aligned with the building's three transepts. In 1864 the Crystal Palace High Level railway station was built alongside the Parade, with pedestrian access to the site via a subway beneath the road, designed by E M Barry.

Despite commercial fluctuations and a major fire in 1866, the Palace operated for eighty-two years until a second fire in 1936 nearly destroyed it completely. The cleared site subsequently served various purposes: during the Second World War it was used as a dumping ground for rubble from London bomb sites, and from the 1950s onward it accommodated a caravan park, a BBC television transmitter and a covered reservoir. The High Level Station was demolished (except for the subway) in 1961 and later developed for housing. The surrounding park was transformed between 1960 and 1964 by construction of the National Recreation Centre.