In the year eighteen-hundred and eighty-six, a fired destroyed the North Transcept of the Crystal Palace. The Garden Gallery on the East Side of the Fine Arts Court was obliterated. The layered, vulvic entrance of the simulated Medieval Court brand and then charred by the unremitting flames. Gothic ceilings, stone fonts and interwoven plumes of fleur-de-lis, all lost forever thanks to the frenzied energy of [bad word] arsonist. The travel writer and essayist, William Cobbett. The auther, Charles [bad word]  The artist, [bad word]  The craftsman and social reformer, William Morris: For outstanding Victorian personalities, but not a single one of them with anything good to say about the Crystal Palace. Somehow, to this fiery, aesthetic minds of the late -1800s this huge monolithic [bad word] must have conjured up distorted visions of industrial ugliness., rather similar, perhaps, to the negative effect that a new office block has upon us today. There was a knee-jerk reaction to modernity. Which is rather ironic, given that the Palace-had its survived-would have [bad word] a vast bastion of antiquity, an overflowing wellspring of art and splendor, and a timeless resource for the beleaguered contemporary soul.

Fifty years on from that inflammatory prototype and somebody notices a flickering glow that dances wildly across the panes of the palace. It’s seven o’clock on the 30th November, 1936, a cold and misty morning, in a city that is just beginning to awaken. The night-watchman desperately grabs a fire extinguisher and attempts to contain a small fire which has broken out in the Central Transcript. His efforts are futile and almost one hour after the fire began an engine has to be summoned from the nearby fire station in Penge. [bad word] up the great hill and along the Parade, but this lone engine would soon be followed by 88 more, including four whole brigades and 749 police officers.

We’re drowning showers of melting glass. Thousands of exploding windows shoot their deadly shards at the helpless statues below. Is this really the end? Must we bear to see Joseph Paxton’s magnum opus falling around our ears cascading [bad word] s from a Titan’s dining table? The giant lilies-cultivated at Chatsworth House- Shrivel in their pond like overlooked mushrooms, as the fountains simmer and boil like huge pots of rice. Wielded by a legion of unseen eunuchs, the green palms wave in the stinging heat as hanging flower-baskets and potted evergreens are consumed by the merciless holocaust.

We’re drowning in the showers of melting glass. Owen Jones spins in his grave as the Moorish surfaces of the Alhambra Court drip like the pages of a waxen Koran. The hieroglyphic silhouettes in the Egyptian Court tumble like ancient dominos, as the paint on two mammoth Abu Simbel figures [bad word] a steaming oilslick of multi-coloured slime. Above them, in the trading galleries, fine clothes, precious metals, musical [bad word]  machinery, patent, leather goods, [bad word]  expensive perfumery and even Horniman’s finest packets of important tea – each annihilated by the raging furnace.

We’re drowning in showers of melting glass. Blackened metal griders capitulate to the laws of gravity and ivy-covered cross-sections [bad word] bent and gnarled. Raphael Monti’s exquisite sculptures are melded together in [bad word] tangle of deformed limbs, their misshapen features like a [bad word] testimony to the formlessness of Modern Art. Dead birds lie scattered throughout the aviaries, their feathers singed and roasted for an imaginary feline banquet. Outside, the crowds are gathering and thousands of people throng the local streets to watch the Palace die. Like many children in the area, my 11 year-old grandfather has made the journey from nearby East Dulwich and sits perched on his father’s shoulders, his bright young face illuminated by the same burning light that can be seen 50 miles away on the south coast.

Only the water towers remained. Silent pillars standing along each side of the eradicated Palace. And then, during the Second World War, these markets of architectural tragedy were thought to serve as useful guides for Luftwaffe and were demolished accordingly. Everything, drowned, in showers of melting glass. Ashes to ashes…and dust…to dust.