Monsters at the Bottom of the Gardens, by Carola Dunn
The setting of my new book, The Corpse at the Crystal Palace (23rd in the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series) was once for many years a prominent London landmark. Built in 1851, entirely of glass and steel, for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, it was disassembled a year later and rebuilt on a hill in South London. Its demise in 1936 in a huge fire was by all accounts spectacular. If you go there today there is nothing to see but the foundation. Except, that is, the monsters at the southwest corner of the extensive gardens. The monsters are the creation of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. A naturalist and sculptor, he was commissioned by the Crystal Palace Company to create lifesize statues of some of the prehistoric beasts whose bones were then being dug up and studied in ever increasing numbers. He went to Richard Owen, the great scientist, for the latest theories of what they might have looked like when alive. Hawkins built in concrete on a massive scale, to match t...