yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Rare Look Inside the Secret Passageway to London’s Lost Crystal Palace | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

You don't know it's there, so literally I can stand on that road up there and say, "Do you know what's under your feet?" and people don't [Music] know.

This subway was a pedestrian footway from the railway station into the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was a rebuild of the Great Exhibition held in 1851 in Hyde Park. The original Crystal Palace building was a modular design, so it could be taken down, and it was moved here so that they could continue to make money from the exhibition. They built a new high-level station about 10 years after the Crystal Palace opened on this site. The station was at the other end of this foot subway, so that you could have a covered entrance.

It's a series of arches which, uh, support the way to the roadway above, probably designed by Charles Barry Jr., who had just come back from a grand tour, including Italy, so it's got an Italian style. The palace burnt down November the 30th, 1936, so after that, there wasn't very much traffic on the line. The station was eventually closed, uh, and so there was no longer a need for the subway.

Crystal Palace is an area that isn't really an area. Crystal Palace doesn't really exist; it gains its name because of the palace that was once there. That it survived in such fantastic condition for so many years is part of an and a very important part of the heritage. The hiddenness of it is really exciting.

Every year we open up as part of Open House London. The demand is clear and I think increasingly so in the UK, community assets are being recognized, and this is very much seen as a community asset. The brickwork inside isn't exposed to the elements, so it has weathered extremely well. It was used in World War II as an air raid shelter, um, it was then used as a store for um statues from the park, uh, that was locked up until the Nor Society started having cultural events down here about once a year during the 1980s.

I like the fact that it's quite ruined and quite magical. Some people think it'd be a great cafe, um, I have plans for it to be a museum. Personally, I think it should maintain its integrity; it should be kept as beautiful as it is now and people should be encouraged to use the space as it is. It's beautiful.

More Articles

View All
Paul Graham: What does it mean to do things that don't scale?
What doing things that don’t scale means specifically is doing things in a sort of handmade, artisanal, painstaking way that you feel like, yeah, it would be great if you could do things that way forever. But you, in the back of your mind, think to yourse…
What's Inside Your Paper Money? | Origins: The Journey of Humankind
The United States is so obsessively protective of its currency that it guards its security right down to the specific fibers that comprise each bill. US currency may be the most counterfeited money in the world. McCrane Paper here in Dalton became the sup…
Adding & subtracting rational expressions: like denominators | High School Math | Khan Academy
So let’s add six over two x squared minus seven to negative three x minus eight over two x squared minus seven. And like always, pause the video and try to work it out before I do. Well, when you look at this, we have these two rational expressions and w…
The Controversial Physics of Curling - COLD HARD SCIENCE - Smarter Every Day 111
Hey, it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So in the last episode, I explained that it’s not always the most athletic team that wins in sport; sometimes it involves the physical manipulation of objects, so sometimes it’s the most intelligent …
A Suspiciously Expensive Delivery | To Catch a Smuggler: South Pacific | National Geographic
Auckland International Airport processes 21 million passengers every year and climbing. Customs and Immigration have just been alerted to a visiting Lithuanian woman with quite a history. Officer James is keen to take on the case. It looks like she had so…
Why Do We Kiss?
Hey, Vsauce, Michael here. Attachment of two people’s lips kissing. The average person will spend about 20,160 minutes of his or her life kissing. And the world record for the longest, continuous kiss is 58 hours, 35 minutes, and 58 seconds. But why do we…