Catford Palace

I've never really understood Crystal Palace as a desirable place to live. To me, it's just another example of special pleading from my generation of out-priced brethren. Unable to afford places that are actually nice, we are obliged by self-respect to lie to ourselves and reinvent the humdrum places we live in as simply super.
 

"Yeah, it's basically Dulwich South"

Crystal Palace has three main roads, describing a triangle of shops, although it's only really got stuff on two of those sides. It's got a swanky cheese shop and a hipster coffee joint, but then again, so has Victoria Station and I don't want to live there either. The trains to Crystal Palace's attractive parti-coloured brick station aren't particularly frequent and aren't particularly fast. The housing stock thereabouts is largely decent Victoriana, sadly hacked into multiple little spaces for young commuters to squeeze into with their iPads and single-speaker Sonos set-ups. It's a bit grubby, congested and windswept. It's not dreadful; but it's nothing special either.

"Yeah, it's basically Dulwich South"

The area's claim to fame is what's not there any more: the eponymous Crystal Palace. The Palace was an insane-scale Victorian sort-of  Millennium Dome of glass and iron, which stood at the top of the hill from 1854 until it burnt down in 1936 (the wooden floor burnt, and caused the rest to collapse).  Perhaps the nearest surviving contemporaneous structures are the wonderful (if slightly worthy) glass houses at Kew.

The remnants of the Palace itself have been totally cleared away. What's left on that large open slope of park is nonetheless quality fodder for desolation-porn lovers. There's a huge terraced hillside of smashed statues, strangely unsmashed Sphinxes, and lovely broad staircases leading nowhere.

'In Dulwich South did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree'

The hill is topped with one of the two TV transmitters that form constellations of red lights in the south London nightscape.  Shallow puddles slosh around the gravelly paths, easy Instagram subjects.  

#NOFITLER!!

There's also the remains of the old high-level train station, which can be peered at from between spike-topped railings.

"Basically better than Dulwich because it's on the Tube"

If you get a bit lost, you might find the Crystal Palace museum, a one-room affair that explains almost nothing, but is nonetheless enticingly free.  

Walking back down from there, you'll find the wonderful unsympathy of the Sports Centre, an attractive concrete affair complete with its own entirely superfluous deck-access pedway. With typical 60s wrong-headedness, the sports centre is much easier to access by car than on foot from the station.

The multi-pyramid installation reminds me of the extant ceiling in the travel centre at Euston, and, for some reason, the egg cups from TV AM (RIP).

Further down, there's a child-thrilling installation of lumpy creatures and dinosaurs, survivors from the days of the Palace. They slightly-jarringly do not quite look the same as those in Jurassic Park (which goes to show where my knowledge of dinosaurs comes from).

The small-bladdered explorer will be delighted to know that there are free loos right at the bottom of hill. And so are Anerley and Penge, each of which sounds a bit filthy.

Penge sports a particularly low-effort Homebase, a grey corrugated-plastic shed. Which is strange because a little further into darkest SE London, there is an early Homebase that rather appealingly apes the form of the Crystal Palace. I've no idea why they tried so hard with these first few Homebases.

That moment in architecture when the Crystal Palace met Tower Gateway DLR

It's even got its own lake and somewhat understated fountain.

I'm not quite wrong enough to suggest that it's more interesting to visit Catford Homebase than Crystal Palace. But it's a close-run thing.