Crystal Palace Park is a two-hundred-acre absurdity in south-east London: a Victorian pleasure ground that never quite recovered from its building burning down in 1936, now home to thirty sculpture-dinosaurs, a brutalist bandstand, and a very tall transmitter tower.
Start at the station and cross into the park via the footbridge. Go up the slope first, not down; you want to arrive at the Italian Terraces with some energy left to look properly. The terraces are what's left of the 1854 Crystal Palace — stone balustrades, sphinxes, the vanished ground-plan of a vanished glass building.
Drop east to the Concert Bowl, a 1961 bandstand that looks better now than it has in forty years, mostly because nature has started to take it back.
The dinosaurs are the main event. Thirty Victorian sculptures of prehistoric animals, carved from scientific knowledge that has since been revised; the iguanodon's thumb, famously, is on its nose. Lit from behind by late afternoon sun, they are uncanny in the best way.
End at the base of the transmitter tower. Three kilometres; a full hour of thinking about the nineteenth century.
