CHATSWORTH TO PENGE

 

Been to Chatsworth today, meeting up with a lad from Leicestershire and his better half and another chap and missus from Derbyshire. The stately home seemed the obvious venue. On a wall was this plaque commemorating Sir Joseph Paxton the celebrated gardener at the big house. How could a local gardener be the designer of the Crystal Palace? To cut a long story short, from his position as Head Gardener at Chatsworth, he carried his interest in the glasshouse, where he managed to grow the Cavendish banana, which accounts for the majority of bananas grown in the world today. Over years of experimentation, his glasshouse design was eventually used in the The Crystal Palace of the Great Expedition in 1851.

After this exhibition, the Palace was relocated to an area of South London known as Penge Common. It was rebuilt at the top of Penge Peak next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent suburb of large villas. It stood there from June 1854 until its destruction by fire in November 1936. The nearby residential area was renamed Crystal Palace after the landmark. This included the Crystal Palace Park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, which had previously been a football stadium that hosted the FA Cup Final between 1895 and 1914. 

Crystal Palace Football Club is a professional football club based in Selhurst, South London, England, who currently compete in the Premier League, the highest level of English football. Although their official founding date is 1905, the club claim to be a continuation of the original amateur Crystal Palace football club first established in 1861, which would make them the oldest professional football club in the world, after historians discovered a direct lineage through their ownership under the same Crystal Palace Company. 

Both the amateur and professional clubs played inside the grounds of the Crystal Palace Exhibition building, with the professional club playing at the stadium until 1915. They were forced to leave the stadium due to the outbreak of the First World War. In 1924, they moved to their current home at Selhurst Park.

The amateur club became one of the original founder members of the Football Association in 1863 and competed in the first ever FA Cup competition in 1871–72, reaching the semi-finals, but disappeared from historical records after the 1875–76 FA Cup. Shortly after Crystal Palace returned to existence in 1905 as a professional club, they applied for election to the Football League, but were rejected and instead played in the Southern League. Palace did eventually join the Football League in 1920, and have overall spent the majority of their league history competing in the top two tiers of English football.