INVENTIONS | BELVEDERE
| MANSARD FLATS
Court owes its history to two great engineering
feats: the railways and the Crystal Palace.
Read on below to find how it all started, or
click the navigation bars immediately above
to know what happened next.
exploded in size as the rail network brought
previously rural areas within commuting distance
of the Capital. Locally, the hamlet of Penge
became commuter territory when the Grand Surrey
Canal was bought by the London, Brighton and
South Coast Railway Company and converted into
the Croydon to London Bridge railway – Penge
West station occupies the site of what was the
canal’s Scott's Wharf.
The Crystal Palace
neighbourhood as we know it today owes its layout
to the decision to relocate the Crystal Palace
to south London after the Hyde Park-based Great
Exhibition of 1851. The land now occupied by
Park Court had once been part of Penge Common,
but by the 1850s belonged to a country mansion
called Penge Place. The Penge Place estate was
sold to the Crystal Palace Company, who built
a (much larger) version of the ground-breaking
building along the ridge of the hill. The Crystal
Palace – as rebuilt here – was the biggest building
in the world.
Lawrie Park area was formed when outlying portions
of the Penge Place estate were sold for building
in order to raise funds for the Palace. Crystal
Palace Park Road, with its substantial Victorian
villas, was a key part of that development.
ironic that since 2007 the Park’s owners (the
London Development Corporation) have been proposing
to build over the remaining open parts of Crystal
Palace Park Road in order to raise funds for
the Park’s restoration.