There are about thirty of them, they were built on this spot between 1853 and 1855, they cost nothing to see, and a full restoration in 2026 ended with Historic England striking them from its Heritage at Risk Register. The repainted sculptures now look as close as anyone can get to what a Victorian visitor saw 172 years ago.
The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs stand on islands in the lakes at the southern end of Crystal Palace Park in south-east London. Nobody anywhere had previously tried to build extinct animals at life size from fossil evidence, and they were unveiled before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Several of them are, by modern standards, badly wrong. That is now the main reason to look at them.
Our guide to Crystal Palace Park covers the maze, the farm, the terraces and the park's opening times, which change every month. This page stays with the sculptures: what the restoration did, how to read the islands, why you cannot walk up to them, and whether the journey out is worth making.
The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs: the practical frame
- Cost
- Free. No ticket, no booking, no time slot
- When
- Whenever the park is open, all year
- Where
- Islands in the tidal lakes, at the park's southern end; go in through Penge Gate, off Thicket Road
- Nearest stations
- Penge West and Crystal Palace; Penge East and Anerley also walkable
- How long
- 45 minutes to an hour for the full circuit of the lakes and the geological displays
- Access
- Step-free on an unpaved footpath, which gets muddy after rain
- Status
- Grade I listed; restoration completed and removed from the Heritage at Risk Register in July 2026
The restoration finished in 2026, and what it changed
For most of the last decade, visitors found the sculptures behind fencing, some of them cracked and shedding paint. That is over. Bromley Council announced on 15 July 2026 that the regeneration programme had concluded and that the dinosaurs and Geological Court had come off Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register, where they had sat since 2020.
The works were paid for by the sale of land next to the park for affordable housing and a £5m grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with further money from the Garfield Weston Foundation, the London Marathon Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation and the Pilgrim Trust. Sally Strachey Historic Conservation carried out the conservation of the sculptures, with advice from Historic England. The council describes it as the largest regeneration programme in the park since the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936.
Three things changed for a visitor:
- The colours. The sculptures have been repainted in line with their original colour schemes. They are brighter and stranger than the muddy greys most photographs online still show.
- The fencing is gone and all the paths around the lakes have reopened. The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs confirmed this in an update in August 2026.
- The rest of the park caught up. A new Visitor Centre opened in July 2026 with a permanent exhibition on the park's 170 years, and the project also delivered a new Dinosaur Playground, restored Italian Terraces, the restored Grand Centre Walk, the reinstated bust of Sir Joseph Paxton and two new accessible routes across the steep upper slopes.
One sculpture is not finished. As of August 2026 the Friends reported that the Megatherium, the giant ground sloth on the Quaternary island, was still to be completed. Everything else is done.
Old advice about scaffolding and closed paths is now out of date. Guidebooks and travel articles written between 2020 and early 2026 describe fenced-off sculptures and restricted paths. The works ended in July 2026, and the whole lakeside circuit is open again.
Photo: Dreizung · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
Only four of them are dinosaurs
The name is a convenience rather than a description. The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the charity that has campaigned for the sculptures since the 2010s, put it plainly: of the roughly thirty statues, only four are dinosaurs in the strict zoological sense. Those four are the two Iguanodon, the Hylaeosaurus and the Megalosaurus.
Everything else is something older, later or entirely different. The group includes the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs whose fossils Mary Anning found at Lyme Regis, pterosaurs, crocodilians, amphibians and extinct mammals. One of them, the Megatherium, represents an animal whose remains Charles Darwin brought back to Britain from the voyage of HMS Beagle. There are also five geological displays and a landscape designed to go with them.
Take binoculars if you are with children, or a phone with a decent zoom. You look at the statues across water, and small ones such as the Teleosaurus and the Xiphodon are easy to miss entirely without them. The Friends suggest exactly this, and there is signage around the lakes explaining what each group is.
The islands are a timeline, and they read right to left
Almost nobody realises this on a first visit, and it is the thing that turns a walk past some statues into something worth the journey. The sculptures are arranged by geological age as you face the islands from the bank.
The oldest species are on the far right: the Labyrinthodon amphibians and the Dicynodon. Moving left, you pass through the Secondary Island, which holds the actual dinosaurs alongside the marine reptiles. Further left again are the Tertiary mammals, and at the far left on the Quaternary islands stand the most recent animals, the giant deer Megaloceros and the giant ground sloth Megatherium.
Walk the circuit in that direction and you are walking forwards through deep time. The geological illustrations built into the hillside were the work of Professor David Ansted, and the whole landscape around them was laid out by Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace itself. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came to see it more than once.
Wrong is the wrong word
The standard line about these sculptures is that the Victorians got the science wrong and the statues are a charming mistake. The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs argue, with the historical research behind them, that this is too simple.
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who modelled them on site, was a natural history illustrator and sculptor with an international reputation, and he worked with the leading anatomists of the day. What the research shows is that experts in the 1850s disagreed with each other, and the sculptures preserve those disagreements in cement. Who decided what each animal should look like remains a matter of historical debate.
That makes the site something more interesting than a museum of errors. It is a record of a moment when the evidence was thin, the questions were enormous and reasonable people reached different answers. Many of the individual sculptures were modelled on fossil specimens still on public display, in South Kensington at the Natural History Museum and in Oxford at the University Museum of Natural History. You can go and look at the bones they were working from.
The other thing they did was start a craze. Bromley Council's account describes the unveiling as setting off the world's first wave of "dino mania", and that part is easy to believe standing in front of them.
The bridge you are not allowed to walk across
The sculptures are seen from across the water, and the reason goes beyond their fragility. The original bridge to the islands was taken out in 2017 when the weir was overhauled, which left the site without proper access for conservation work.
The Friends ran a crowdfunding campaign in 2018 to replace it, backed by Bromley Council, the Mayor of London, Historic England and more than 600 individual contributors. The architects Tonkin Liu, the engineers Arup and the Sydenham metal fabricators Cake Industries designed and built a laser-cut steel swing bridge, which was installed on 13 January 2021. It won a prize at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for its use of materials.
It is locked. The bridge pivots open and closed, and when it is closed it is not connected to either bank. Access is for maintenance, conservation monitoring and occasional escorted groups, never as a general public route. The islands themselves are steep and rocky and cannot be regraded because the whole site is Grade I listed. The Friends have 3D-scanned the sculptures so that people who cannot get onto the islands can still see them close up. If mobility is a concern more widely, see our guide to accessible London.
Climbing onto the islands is trespass, and damaging a Grade I monument is a criminal offence. The Friends state this directly on their visitor page. It is also a genuinely bad idea: the ground is steep, the water is deep in places, and there is no path.
The sculpture that came back
One of the group is not Victorian at all. Research by the Friends established that a pony-sized Palaeotherium magnum had stood among the Eocene mammals on the Tertiary island and vanished some time in the middle of the twentieth century, with no record of what became of it.
Rather than leave the gap, they commissioned the palaeoartist Bob Nicholls to build a replacement, supervised by the Friends and staff from the University of Portsmouth and funded by the Crystal Palace Park Trust and public donations with support from Historic England and Bromley Council. It was unveiled in July 2023 and stands with the other Palaeotherium sculptures. If you know it is there, you can spot the one that is 169 years younger than its neighbours.
Six sculptures were missing altogether when major conservation work began in 2001, so the site you see today is already partly a reconstruction. That work also rebuilt geological illustrations that had become unrecognisable, including a section of limestone cliff with a model lead mine that had been blown up in 1962 to make room for the sports stadium.
Getting to the right end of the park
Crystal Palace Park is large and sits on a hill, and the dinosaurs are at the bottom of it. Coming in at the wrong gate means a long walk downhill and a longer one back up.
- Penge Gate, off Thicket Road, is the entrance you want. The visitor centre, public toilets, a café and the closest paid car park are all at this end.
- Penge West is the closest station, five to ten minutes on foot. Crystal Palace station serves the top of the park, where the terraces and the maze are. Penge East and Anerley are also within walking distance.
- Trains. Both stations are served by Southern and by the London Overground's Windrush line, whose new name is explained in our guide to the Overground and the DLR.
- The path around the lakes is step-free but unpaved, and it is properly muddy after rain. Wear something you do not mind ruining.
Allow 45 minutes to an hour for the lakes, the geological displays and the signage. If you are making a half-day of it, add the terraces on the upper slopes, the new playground and the boating lake, where the pedalos work as described in our guide to hiring a boat in London's parks.
Is it worth the journey from central London?
Yes, with one condition: go because the sculptures interest you, not because you want a dinosaur day out for a child who wants to see a Tyrannosaurus. There is no Tyrannosaurus here, and there was never going to be; it had not been discovered in 1854.
What you get instead is a Grade I listed Victorian landscape that no other city has, freshly restored, in a park that costs nothing to enter, well off the standard London attractions circuit. For a family watching its money, few free hours in London are better spent, and there is a playground and a farm on the same site. For context, see what else costs nothing in our guide to free London, and the arithmetic in what a day in London costs. Families will also want our wider guide to London with children.
Combine it with Forest Hill's Horniman Museum, about twenty minutes away by bus and also free, or with the surrounding area, which our guide to Crystal Palace and Forest Hill covers. Older children who have outgrown model animals may prefer the specimen collections in our round-up of London museums that work for teenagers, or the Grant Museum of Zoology in Bloomsbury.
This corner of south London also does autumn well. See our guide to autumn colour in London for where else to go in late October, and the running routes guide if you would rather see the hill at speed.
Frequently asked questions
How many Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are there?
About thirty sculptures, plus five geological displays. Only four of them are dinosaurs in the strict sense: the two Iguanodon, the Hylaeosaurus and the Megalosaurus. The rest are marine reptiles, pterosaurs, crocodilians, amphibians and extinct mammals.
Are the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs worth visiting?
If the history of science interests you at all, yes. Nothing of the kind had been built anywhere before, they hold the highest listing grade, they were fully restored and repainted in 2026, and looking at them is free. They are not a replacement for a dinosaur museum.
Have the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs been restored?
Yes. The restoration was completed in 2026 and Historic England removed the sculptures and the Geological Court from its Heritage at Risk Register, which Bromley Council announced on 15 July 2026. The fencing has gone and the paths have reopened. The Megatherium was still being finished in August 2026.
Can you walk up to the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs?
No. They stand on islands, and the viewing point is the bank on the far side of the water. A locked swing bridge, installed in January 2021, is used for conservation work and occasional escorted groups only. Climbing onto the islands is trespass and can amount to criminal damage.
How long does it take to see the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs?
Allow 45 minutes to an hour to walk the lakes, take in the geological displays and read the signage. Half a day is easy if you add the terraces, the new playground and the boating lake at the same site.
Sources
- London Borough of Bromley - Crystal Palace Dinosaurs removed from Heritage at Risk Register (15 July 2026) (checked September 2026)
- Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - Visitor's Guide (updated July 2026) (checked September 2026)
- Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - What are the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs? (checked September 2026)
- Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - Conservation (checked September 2026)
- Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - The Bridge Project (checked September 2026)
- Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - Learn about the statues (checked September 2026)