A hilltop park of broken Victorian terracing and Grade I listed dinosaur sculptures, above a shopping triangle on the ridge.
What Crystal Palace looks like
The Triangle is a shopping street on top of the ridge, where , Westow Hill and Church Road come together. Cream rendered Victorian corner buildings carry black timber shopfronts, hanging pub signs and flower baskets under the upper windows, with independent shops set behind painted signage at street level. The former Rialto cinema at 25 Church Road, built in 1928, now trades as an Everyman behind its restored Art Deco facade.
The park drops away below the Triangle. Broken stone terracing and a row of sphinx statues from 1854 stand at the top of a flight of steps, looking down over lawns toward a lake ringed with dinosaur sculptures from the same year, the first full scale dinosaur models built anywhere. A steel lattice transmitter mast rises 219 metres above the park's high point, visible over the trees from most of the paths below.
A vaulted Victorian brick subway runs underneath the road that tops the ridge, its fan shaped columns patterned in red and cream brick. To the north, the yellow brick retaining wall of the old high level station stands roofless behind a service yard. The National Sports Centre's running track and grandstand sit on open ground inside the park, floodlights ringing an empty pitch.
Away from the shops, woodland paths cut through dense tree cover on the park's western side, the ground floored in leaf litter and exposed roots. The residential streets off Anerley Hill drop steeply from the ridge. A former corner pub there still has its old painted lettering above a black timber shopfront, run today as a community venue.
Shot in Crystal Palace
Crystal Palace Park plays itself on screen as often as it stands in for somewhere else. Good Omens used as the backdrop for a scene in its first season opener. Morbius dressed the Italian Terraces as New York's Central Park, with a replica of the Central Park fountain built for the shoot. Black Doves used a private house on Tudor Road as a lead character's home, across eleven interior rooms and four exterior areas.
The Italian Job, 1969
Charlie and Arthur watch the getaway van explode from the foot of the transmitter mast, parked on the small green patch by the park's Canada Gates entrance. It is an oddly public spot for the gang to test a bomb, out in the open rather than somewhere hidden.
What Crystal Palace can double for
Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York
Prospect Park has the same Victorian era public park character as Crystal Palace Park, a boating lake ringed by wooded paths on rising ground. Both were laid out as a single designed landscape rather than grown piecemeal, so the same curving paths and specimen trees read the same way on camera. Prospect Park's Long Meadow is far more open than Crystal Palace's wooded slopes, so tighter shots around the lake and woodland paths hold the match best. Any glimpse of the Manhattan skyline through the trees would need to stay out of frame. Try searching Victorian park with a lake now.
Totterdown in Bristol, England
Totterdown's steep residential streets, among the sharpest gradients in England, are lined with the same scale of Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing that climbs the streets off Crystal Palace's own ridge. Both neighbourhoods sit on a hillside above a city centre, with the grade itself doing most of the visual work. Many of Totterdown's houses are painted in bright colours that Crystal Palace's brick and render fronts do not share, so a production would need a stretch of unpainted terraces or dress the colour out. Try searching steep Victorian terraced street now.
The streets around Rue Lepic share Crystal Palace's hilltop position, the roofline dropping away at the end of the block to a full panorama of the city below. Steps and a church tower stand at the top of the rise, the same composition Crystal Palace's own streets have looking north. Montmartre's cobbled steps, zinc mansard roofs and stone facades are unmistakably French in a wide shot. The match only holds in a tight frame on the street itself, cropped above the rooflines. Try searching hilltop street panorama now.
