A glittering beacon

Until its destruction in the fire of 1936, the Crystal Palace was one of the world's most exciting music venues, and its legacy still lives on today, writes Tom Service.

- Tom Service.

They are impassive observers of one of the grandest views in South London, at the top of Crystal Palace Park, with a horizon of Surrey and Kent beneath them: half-adozen terracotta sphinxes, relics of one of the greatest sites of music-making anywhere in the world, from 1854 until 30 November 1936. That’s when the Crystal Palace and its 293,000 panes of glass burned to the ground, and little, apart from the terrace the gigantic structure sat on, survived the inferno.