Dinosaur Island at Crystal Palace

As regular sufferers of this blog will know, I've long been in love with the dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Place, built in the 1850s. Today, the clever Dr had booked us in to a rare trip onto the island so we could get up close to the lovely, cumbersome beauties.

The pictures below show the amazing efforts of the conservation team - and how much they still have to do. So if you like these pictures, fling money at the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs conservation page. You're welcome to reproduce the images I took, but ideally make a donation to the friends, and credit the pictures to me.

Mosasaurus
Note the second set of teeth inside

Iguanadon

Pteradactylus x2

Lord of Chaos inspecting Iguandon's bum

Inside brick-built Iguanadon
(This is where they put the steam motor in my story)

Hylaeosaurus spines

Megalosaurus

Teleosaurus x2, and Christmas presents

Megalosaurs eyeing up Hylaeosaurus
and 2x Iguanadon

Iguanadons chillax

The relative sizes of claws

Iguanadon, mid anecdote

An Iguanadon, surrounded by lunch

Mosasaurus waving us goodbye - note those secondary teeth

The Dr, in her best clothes

See also Doctor Who in Crystal Palace.

Victorian dinosaurs

Earlier this week, the Dr pointed me in the direction of Professor Joe Cain's splendid talk on the dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Palace, which you can watch here:



It's a great talk with some amazing insights and pictures - including of the insides of the dinosaurs. I love those dinosaurs and visit them a lot. (They've also appeared twice on the cover of Doctor Who Magazine.)

Then, last night, Nimbos and I attended "Planet of the Dinosaurs", a talk at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where Dave Hone, paleontologist from Queen Mary gave a history of the dinosaurs as, on the vast Planetarium screen, Earth's continents shifted before our very eyes.

My favourite fact of the evening was about the very well preserved fossils found in Liaoning province in northern China. Paleontologists have not only found the remains of small, feathered dinosaurs, they also know the fauna and weather. In the cool drizzle, dinosaurs would have run through the magnolia blossom and between rhododendrons. Exactly the plants and weather of a Victorian garden - or the Crystal Palace.

Troodon formosus and Magnolia by John Conway

Victorian rhapsody

To the British Library last night for a “Late at the library” event. There was Victorian Values – a lively show by the Ministry of Burlesque. There was the chance to dress up and have pictures taken by Madame la Luz's Photographic Parlour. A splendid brass band played versions of “YMCA” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. And there was a high proportion of slapped-up goth girls in the audience, bursting from their clothes. Though I, er, didn't really notice.


There seemed to be too audiences for the event – the goths affecting the age with barely corsetted flesh and those wanting to perambulate round the Points of View exhibition (free until 7 March 2010), which tells the history of photography through some rare and extraordinary images.

We ably straddled both factions. The exhibition is glorious – and free. There's film explaining the difference between the Daguerre and Fox Talbot methods, and a wealth of nineteenth century capturings from all round the world.

The Dr was thrilled by the archaeological specimens – including that famous shot by Corporal J McCartney of Charles Newton and the ropes round the lion of Cnidus, on which she wrote a book. I loved Philip Henry Delamotte's images from the construction of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, including my beloved monsters.

There was also the splendid Victorian hippopotamus and an astonishing nineteenth century photographic atlas of the moon, and photography changing our understanding of family, history, science and our own time. The explanatory panels delved into the politics of photographing empire and criminals, and the assumptions made by the “reality” of the image. There were gems embedded all through the thing, and I will have to go again.

It perhaps dwelt too much on the process and practice of photography, with less on the way the ordinary punter might collect, display and use the images. And, of course, the shop was shut by the time we came out, so there was no chance of checking which images exist as postcards.

Day tripper

It has been a weekend of day-trips to far-flung places, when I should have been writing a script. After work on Friday we ventured north to the Victoria Stakes in Muswell Hill, requiring a combination of tube and bus.

A man on the W7 provided a running commentary on the weather, and volunteered solo versions of When The Saints Go Marching In, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and, er, Electric Ladyland, for as long as he could remember the lyrics. I drank lots of Black Sheep and forgot quite how long it would take to get home. Apparently I stank of warm beer all night.

On Saturday we made our way to Cambridge where some chums led us round some pubs. In the St Radegund - apparently the smallest pub in Cambridge - the Dr was much excited by the signs for Milton Brewery's Nero, but it wasn't on. So I had a rather nice pint of Icarus instead. I've always had an affinity for the mythic Icarus.

By the time we'd had tea and caught the stopping train home, it was getting a bit late. So I didn't quite get, as I'd hoped, to see Primeval on ITVplayer.

Today we were due to meet J. and R. and E., over from America and seeing the Science Museum. Being a bit early meant we could pop into see rooms 88a and 90 of the V&A where there's a small exhibition (until 22 November) of stuff relating to and by Owen Jones, author of the Grammar of Ornament (1856 and still in print). There are splendid abstract designs for wallpaper and furnishings, photos of the real Alhambra alongside Jones' ideas for the Alhambra court in the Crystal Palace, and his designs for an even bigger and bolder exhibition greenhouse never built in St Cloud, Muswell Hill.

Jones didn't like to base his designs on nature, feeling that disrupted the flatness of his surfaces. Instead he's much influenced by Islamic geometric shapes and tessellating trickery. Of one 1860 design (D. 817-1897), the sign says "The geometry and rigid layout may remind some viewers of school chemistry textbooks", and neatly places this next to Odell's 1951 wallpaper design for the Festival of Britain, based on the molecular structure of boric acid.

We sandwiched in the sunshine behind the Albert Memorial with J. and E. and R. (who'd never see the thing before), then got a cab across to the South Bank where we left them to the Eye. Instead, the Dr and I tried the Hayward Gallery and Mark Wallinger's Russian linesman exhibition (on until 4 May, then moving to Leeds and Swansea).

It's basically a museum of cool stuff: Wallinger's own TARDIS in all its reflective glory (I wanted to give it a hug); eerie photos of death masks of the Romantic poets; a corridor that climbs up a wall; stereoscopic photographs; footage of Berlin as it was and is now, the locations playing out side-by-side. The idea, if I understood it, is to showcase stuff on the boundaries of our perception, or at least that makes you thing, "Woah, cool!"

Also got a look round Annette Messager's The Messengers (until 25 May) for free, full of nightmarish conjoinments of stuffed toys and taxidermy, and body-like things inflating and shambling. The shop was full of much cool stuff too; though it only had three postcards from the Wallinger exhibition, and charged a fair old whack for everything else.

Was £5 for a glass of wine outside, but it seemed wrong to ignore the nice sunshine. And so home and to the script - and perhaps Primeval. New desk arrives on Wednesday, so I'm knocking this out on the floor. The photo, right, is me tocking away the first paragraph of this post. Which is like on the boundaries of our perceptions or something. Or, perhaps, it's not.

Doctor Who in Crystal Palace

For my own amusement, chiefly, here's two Doctor Who magazine covers showing the Doctor's pretty friends larking about in my hood.

This one shows Doctor Who's granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford. She's being a cave-woman in homage to the very first Doctor Who story, which featured cave men who've forgotten how to make fire. It's from a special photo shoot for the Radio Times special commemorating 10 whole years of Doctor Who, back in 1973. In the larger version of the picture, you can see Crystal Palace's monsters behind her.

And this one shows Sophie Aldred as Ace in a specially commissioned shot for DWM. Local magazine The Transmitter has just done a cover shoot of models taking tea with the monsters, which reminded me of this.

Prevention of cruelty to monsters

There are monsters down my road. No, really.

Well, strictly speaking, there are monsters down my road, over the railway bridge, right, left, right again, left again and then sort of diagonally left round the artificial lake. But, for monsters, that’s pretty close. And I do go to visit them often.

Until five years ago, the monsters looked a bit shabby and uncared for, but a recent programme of repair has done them some good, and repaired the exposed strata of rocks that helped explain them in context. Excitingly, as of two days ago, they are now monsters with Grade 1 listing.

(I started writing this post two days ago, but things keep getting in the way.)

Anyway, this is a good thing.

The monsters are made of brick and concrete – the Victorian equivalent of CGI. They are fat and cumbersome and the iguanodon is wearing his thumb on his nose. They’re not dinosaurs, because we know better now about what dinosaurs looked like: Victorian palaeontologists only had scant evidence to guess from, and we’ve got a bit more to go on now.

The information boards nearby helpfully explain the differences between what Richard Owen – who supervised the monsters’ construction, coined the word “dinosaur” and wasn’t terribly lovely – thought and what palaeontologists now think today. Dinosaurs were really quick and slender, and in fact they didn’t die out. Instead their descendents are those feathered things cluttering up the sky.

(I have this vision of an avian Quatermass and the Pit, with an owlish Andre Morell explaining to the masses that in fact, “We are the dinosaurs.”)

The monsters are then a folly, a bold statement of ultimately not-quite-right thought. Cumbersome and somewhat cuddly, you could clearly out-walk them. I find them especially endearing because of that. And I’m glad the powers that are have come to agree.