Dinosaurs! 24 March

It was the best of rides, it was the worst of rides.   It was cold, it was hot.  It was flat, there was a big hill.   There were dinosaurs, there was Croydon.  But I didn't mention Croydon in the pre-ride publicity, so loads of people turned up at North Cheam.  Eighteen!   And that's just the cyclists - there were dozens of others just supping their early morning pints, as you do.

Anyway, now we know what Cheam & Morden riders like.   Dinosaurs.   It was nice to see Richard at North Cheam, and also Robert and Margaret, returned from Canada for a while, and Mark who's been busy with something called work, and a young family.  Ed, Richard and Margaret had just come for elevenses, so a group of fifteen set off on the ride.  It was loosely based on my Wayfarers London ride in 2018, a very long time ago, when dinosaurs had only just become extinct, and Covid hadn't been invented.

We followed route 75 eastwards from North Cheam, along the baby river Wandle to its source, or one of them; and then used Paul and Maggie James' latest route through Croydon, managing to dodge the tram lines and most of the traffic.  Along the Addiscombe Railway Park and then turned north to begin a gradual, and gradually steepening, climb towards the now visible transmitter tower at Crystal Palace.

The last stretch up Anerley Road was proper lung-busting stuff, but we all felt a sense of something when we arrived at *NOT* the site of the Crystal Palace exhibition, 1851 (see later).  Was it awe, or was it just exhaustion?   The exhibition had 100,000 exhibits and attracted over six million visitors.  The most popular exhibit, as judged by me, were the world's first public toilets, known as the Retiring Rooms, which cost a penny to use.  The profits (£21 million in today's money) were used to found the V&A, Natural History and Science museums.

The building had 60,000 panes of glass and a floor area of about a million square feet, which sounds quite impressive, but in metric it is only about thirteen football pitches.   Unlucky for some, since the whole structure was moved after the exhibition to a permanent location in Penge  (the cost of the move was nearly ten times the cost of the original construction), and only 80 years later it burnt down.  It came as quite a surprise since it was made of glass and cast iron, not renowned for being flammable.  Wikipedia article.   *Edit* Apparently my thorough research late last night was not thorough enough.  The Great Exhibition was in fact in Hyde Park, and the structure was re-opened on its new site at Penge  Common in 1854.  The area became known as Crystal Palace only after the building of the same name was moved there.   Confused?  I was.   Thank you to Dave Vine for pointing me in the right direction, not for the first time.

Crystal Palace viewed from Anerley Road

After relocation to Penge Common, which was
later renamed after the building to Crystal Palace.

But I digress.   So we did a bit of a tour around Crystal Palace Park, admiring the trees, the lakes, the sphinxes somehow left behind from the Great Exhibition, all the while thinking ... where are the dinosaurs?   Suddenly we saw them, luckily segregated by a moat around their island, otherwise it would have been too dangerous for the many small children wandering around.   They have been lovingly restored since my last visit in 2018, with the very latest dinosaur colour scheme, and were looking very fetching, and fierce of course, in the sunlight.   We took a few photos, actually, quite a lot of photos, and then it was lunchtime so we stopped at a nearby Wetherspoons, the Retiring Rooms, in nearby Penge.  When the sun was out, it was pretty warm, so we had lunch outside, perhaps for the first time this year?

Dinosaurs!

General excitement and milling about

Tree growing at a funny angle (?)

After lunch, we followed the river variously known as the Ravensbourne Brook, River Pool, and Dartford Creek, downstream to Greenwich, had a quick look at the Cutty Sark, where we tried and failed to decode the message being displayed by the signal flags.  We then rode along the river for a bit, admiring the sunlit views along the Thames, before joining the newly completed Cycleway 4, (Greenwich to London Bridge) for a very straighforward ride into Southwark, turning onto C14 to Waterloo.

Our fifteen had now dwindled to eleven with the loss of David W, Mark, Keith and Andy, and we had already lost two back-markers, so we stopped for tea in Lower Marsh.  We couldn't use my planned tea stop, because it had somehow ceased to exist since my recce ride, but in a perfectly acceptable nearby cafe.  Dawn caught the train home, Carolyn failed to catch a train home (they were very infrequent) so rejoined the rest of us to ride back to Richmond Park, a scenic route taking in the London Eye, Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, C15 and Putney Bridge, site of the Boat Race next week.

Cutty Sark and crew

What does it say?

We arrived in Richmond Park as the sun was setting in the west and a beautiful full moon was rising in the east.   A good day out.  Thanks to everyone who came along and made it such an enjoyable day, to David, Andy, Geoff, Christina for photos, and to David, Andy, Geoff and Alan for back marking.

Full list of lunch attendees: Christina, Bernard, Sabina, Geoff, Steph, Robert, Carolyn, Alan, and Lilian, David W, Mark, Keith, Dawn, Andy, myself.

letter J   or  "I am on fire and have a dangerous cargo"

letter K  or "I wish to communicate with you"

letter W or "I require medical assistance"

letter S or "I am operating astern propulsion"

The top flag is a special version of the Red Ensign for ships on the National Register of Historic Vessels.   So now you know.