Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (33 page)

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Authors: Suggs

This Victorian Jurassic Park was conceived by Professor Richard Owen, one of the most colourful and controversial characters in Victorian science. He had been recruited by Paxton and his colleagues to devise a headline-grabbing attraction to help launch Crystal Palace mark two in its new location south of the city. There were no dinosaurs on display in the Hyde Park show: these lumbering beauties were specially commissioned to cause a stir in Sydenham.

Owen, born in 1804, was a brilliant anatomist who had risen to become one of the leading scientists of the day. He was also a great believer in public education, and would later be the driving force behind the establishment of one of London’s greatest cathedrals of learning: the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. In the late 1820s he was appointed by the Royal College of Surgeons to be the assistant curator of their Hunterian Collection, an assemblage of 13,000 medical curiosities - human and animal - which had been left to the College by one of its distinguished members, John Hunter. You can still see his collection today if you visit the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Owen’s work on the collection gained him a reputation as one of the most eminent anatomists of the day, and all sorts of weird and wonderful animal remains found their way to his dissecting table over the years. One of his jobs was to study the remains of unusual creatures which had died at London Zoo, and legend has it that one day his unfortunate wife returned home to discover a dead rhino blocking the entrance hall.

Owen’s work also brought him to the attention of the British Association, who asked him to provide a report on the many mysterious fossils which had recently been discovered across the country. He soon realised they were unlike any other animal remains he had ever seen and coined a new term - ‘dinosaur’ or ‘terrible lizard’ - to describe the huge creatures from which they must have come. It was a name that stuck, even though there has subsequently been much debate as to whether dinosaurs were even cold-blooded, let alone actually lizards. Over the coming years, as more and more dinosaur bones were discovered, Owen made it his business to be seen as the world’s leading authority on the subject, ruthlessly sidelining anyone else who tried to stray on to his palaeontological patch. So it was no surprise that, in 1852, the Crystal Palace Company came knocking on his door after they’d decided to create a dinosaur display for the new park in Sydenham.

Owen jumped at the chance to create this new attraction. To help him realise his vision, he enlisted the help of an artist and sculptor called Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Owen provided Hawkins with his estimates of the likely shape and size of the creatures, based on his careful scrutiny of the excavated bones. Hawkins then worked to create life-sized models of the mighty beasts - no mean feat when you remember the stature of the creatures he was dealing with. Here, in Hawkins’ own words in a lecture he gave in 1854, is what went into the construction of the iguanodon, just one of the models on show at Crystal Palace: ‘four iron columns nine feet long by seven inches diameter, 600 bricks, 650 five-inch half-round drain tiles, 900 plain, 38 casks of cement, 90 casks of broken stone, making a total of 640 bushels of artificial stone. These, with 100 feet of iron hooping and 20 feet of cube inch bar, constitute the bones, sinews and muscles of this large model, the largest of which there is any record of a casting being made.’

It sounds like more than enough to build a decent-sized house, and, sure enough, the dinosaurs themselves are built on a monumental scale. Alongside mighty beasts like the iguanodon and megalosaurus, you can find three partially submerged ichthyosaurus models, a labyrinthodon, a family of elk-like megaloceros and some pterodactyls. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the plans did not include a life-sized model of a Raquel Welch-style huntress, in all her
One Million Years BC
stone-age finery. I have a feeling that such an addition would have made the display even more popular with the great Victorian public, or the male half of it at least.

Although the size of the creations is the first thing that strikes you as you approach these islands that time forgot, a closer look reveals that Hawkins was obviously a highly skilled artist. As I step up to the mighty iguanodon - surely the star of the show - to take a closer look, I forget Hawkins’ long list of ingredients from the builders’ merchants and marvel at the finished thing. To my untutored eye this beast looks pretty convincing. The horn on the end of his nose is particularly impressive.

Which just goes to prove once and for all how little I do know about dinosaurs because, as it turns out, the models here are riddled with inaccuracies. They certainly bear very little resemblance to later visualisations of the creatures, which is hardly surprising when you consider that in many cases Owen and Hawkins were basing their models on the evidence contained in just a few small fragments of bone. They were also pioneers in an entirely new field - the models here were built several years before Darwin shocked the Victorians with his theory of evolution - so they can surely be excused the many errors in their designs, including the impressive nasal appendage sported by the iguanodon: later palaeontologists discovered that this horn-like bone was in fact one of the iguanodon’s claws.

The dinosaur display - for all its glorious inaccuracy - was a sensation and the star attraction of the park in its early years. To mark the completion of its construction, Owen organised a celebratory dinner for 21 Victorian worthies. He obviously had difficulties getting a table at the Ivy, since the meal was actually dished up at a table placed inside the belly of the iguanodon itself. I’ve eaten in some strange places in my time, but never one quite as idiosyncratic as that. I only hope there were no vegetarians present.

The display you can see today is impressive enough, but Owen and Hawkins had originally planned something even more dramatic. Besides building more dinosaurs, they intended that the artificial lake in which their islands were situated should rise and fall as though the tide was coming in and out, revealing or submerging different parts of the display according to the time of day. In the event, the cash ran out before the design could be implemented and today the water levels are fixed. Only the ducks who paddle on the pond know what murky prehistoric survivors are lurking beneath the surface here.

There’s an interesting postscript to the story of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Hawkins was blamed for pushing the project over budget and decided to try his luck in pastures new. A few years later he surfaced in New York, where he was commissioned to build a new set of dinosaurs to go on display in Central Park. By now, many more fossilised remains had been discovered, which meant that the New York examples Hawkins created were far more accurate than the London prototypes. Instead of the chunky, bulky elephants on steroids I saw grazing in Crystal Palace Park, the drawings of his New York creations show a far more anatomically accurate set of creatures, with elegant long necks and slender limbs. There are no misplaced digits gracing the noses of this impressive collection. But if you happen to find yourself in New York these days, don’t bother to go dinosaur hunting in its great park. It seems that Hawkins had a falling out with some of the city’s corrupt politicians, including the notorious William Magear ‘Boss’ Tweed. Anyone with a passing interest in American politics - or, indeed, with the classic 1970s series
The Dukes of Hazard
- will know that it is always a bad idea to pick a quarrel with a man whose nickname is ‘Boss’. Sadly, Hawkins did exactly that and paid the ultimate price. Tweed despatched a gang of his finest thugs to break into Hawkins’ workshop and trash his dinosaurs. I don’t think he woke up with a megalosaurus head in his bed, but he certainly got the message not to mess with Mr Tweed and left the city soon afterwards. It’s said that today their remains are still buried somewhere in Central Park, lying in wait to confuse the archaeologists of the future.

The Crystal Palace dinosaurs may have topped the bill when the park first opened, but, over the years, they found themselves upstaged by a string of other new attractions. In 1864, for example, a pneumatic railway was built, which enabled visitors to enjoy a 600-yard trip down a brick tunnel in a railway carriage which was sucked through the tunnel at a speed of 25mph by a vacuum-creating steam engine. I’m not sure I understand the physics, but I can’t think of many better ways to spend a sixpence.

The park continued to offer Londoners a big day out right through to the early years of the twentieth century, even staging 20 cup finals between 1895 and 1914 - none of them contested by Chelsea, sadly. But its best days were behind it. During the First World War it was used as a naval supply depot and although it reopened as an amusement attraction in 1920, the end was in sight. The fountains no longer flowered, and the massive fire which finally destroyed the place in 1936 almost came as a relief, putting the tired exhibition out of its misery once and for all.

But still - marvellously, miraculously - the dinosaurs survive. They’ve stood firm through everything the last century or so could throw at them, including the bombs of the Luftwaffe. And they may even live to see a new Crystal Palace rise on the site of the original. If some recent reports I’ve read about in the papers are to be believed, there are plans afoot to try to build a new version of the original.

That’s what I love about London most of all - the sheer resilience of the place and its dauntless capacity for reinvention. So where better to end my journey through the endlessly surprising city I’m proud to call my home than here, a place where even the mighty dinosaurs themselves are still not quite extinct? There they stand, still grazing solemnly in the park that time forgot: the megalosaurus, the ichthyosaurus and the mighty iguanodon himself - still wondering why a so-called expert stuck his thumb on to his forehead, and still waiting patiently for the tide to turn.

Further Reading

This Bright Field
William Taylor (Methuen, 2000)

Soho in the Fifties
Daniel Farson (Michael Joseph, 1987)

Absolute Beginners
Colin MacInnes (MacGibbon & Kee, 1959)

You’re Barred, You Bastards
Norman Balon (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991)

Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy
Ian Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)

Beau Brummell: His Life and Letters
Lewis Melville (Hutchinson, 1924)

London: A Literary Companion
Peter Vansittart (John Murray, 1992)

The Horse-World of London
W. J. Gordon (Kessinger, [1893] 2008)

London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew (Routledge, [1851] 1967)

The Mysteries of London
G. W. M. Reynolds (Keele University Press, [1869] 1996)

Italian Food
Elizabeth David (Macdonald, 1954)