THE CRYSTAL PALACE 1854-1936 On Post Cards
By Fred Peskett and Bill Tonkin

This is a survey of the old picture post cards of the Crystal Palace, that huge glass structure designed by Sir Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of All Nations in 1851. It was dismantled and re-assembled at Penge Place in a greatly modified form, opening in 1854 and destroyed by fire on 30th November 1936.

Compiling this survey has proved to be a mammoth task, it is one that can never be considered complete since there are so many variations of a single view on a post card by the large number of publishers and printers during the forty years from the introduction of the first picture post card in 1895 to the destruction in 1936.

A significant area that has been researched is of the view of the Palace taken from the bridge at the low level Railway Station. Probably more cards were published of this particular view than any other view in the history of the picture post card. Yet the number of photographs taken to produce this huge amount of post cards over the years has been found to be under a dozen, with prints from the some of the original negatives being sold around the post card publishing trade. One negative has been identified as being used by 65 different publishers, many of them anonymously, perhaps pirated. The first chapter deals with this subject in detail and is based on a study of many hundreds of post cards of this one view.

One problem was that several of the publishers used the same title on many different views of the Palace or the events which have taken place there, or even worse from a researchers point of view have published long series with no titles at all. These have been illustrated in this work and by numbering them 1, 2, 3 etc. to identify them, and with in some cases a text description added in order to clarify further.

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