On a still, grey, temperate London morning I rode a bus to Crystal Palace Park. Named for the building which hosted the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851, the park is now something of an anachronism, being merely the site where the palace was relocated before it burned to the ground in 1936. All that remains of the palace are, well, remains: a stairway to an empty plateau, weather-worn stone barriers and a handful of statues. Otherwise it has the feel of any large suburban park, albeit one richer in features. The best of these features is Dinosaur Court, an enclosed area around the lake where ancient mottled green beasts pose for curious children and greying 31-year-old ex-children. These 19th century models, designed in consultation with a then-eminent palaeontologist, were intended to be scientifically accurate representations of extinct species, the first of their kind in the world, but 164 years of developments in the field have instead rendered them quaint monuments to an earlier, more ignorant age. Monstrous and misshapen, they recall creatures from fantastical stop-motion effects sequences more than anything that ever actually walked the earth.
Wandering among these peculiar forms proved to be an eerily familiar experience: I had spent hours of my youth obsessing over images of the park in a jumbo-sized dinosaur magazine, the models' idiosyncrasies immediately distinguishing them from the more standard renditions found elsewhere in the issue, and now here they were, on the same logs and islands and rock formations, mere feet from where I stood. I was taken back to scenes from my childhood, to weekend afternoons lying on rot-patterned floorboards, flipping through dinosaur compendiums with my brother. Mostly I would search for illustrations of my favourite dinosaur, the Parasaurolophus, a duckbilled herbivore with an attractive curving crest. The compendiums which neglected to include it would always end up at the bottom of the return pile. Like most kids with a dinosaur fixation, I spent far more time liking dinosaurs than learning about them.
Curiously, on this still, grey, temperate morning, I was, as far as I could discern, the only tourist. Beyond families with strollers and the occasional echoing cry from the sports stadium, the place was quiet and serene, a respite from the overcrowded parks of the city. I sat on a bench on the hill overlooking the dominion of the magnificent plump-bellied Iguanodon and drifted off inside a book.