Crystal Palace. It sounds so beautiful. Only Primrose Hill can really compete with it as a marketing person’s dream for a name to make people come and look at property. I haven’t been there for ages, so someone please tell me if I’ve got this all wrong, but I remember Crystal Palace as being a bit of a disappointment. Not least because there is no Crystal Palace. Ah well, there’s no Santa Claus either. I should’ve known better. Locals — no doubt PR people — claim that there really was a Crystal Palace, made entirely of iron and glass, but it burned down before the War. How credible is that? How do you accidentally burn down something made only of iron and glass? You would have to melt it down; it would take days. So I am not sure I believe a word of it.

Westow Hill runs west from Crystal Palace Parade. Jasper Road and Farquhar Road ,which run from Westow Hill towards Dulwich, contain Victorian terraces and detached houses in mock-Tudor style. On the other side of Westow Hill are streets such as St Albans Road with more Victorian houses, now in Gothic style. The streets between Church Road and Anerley Road is a conservation area which includes Crystal Palace’s most prestigious streets, Belvedere Road and Foxhill. There are large detached and semi-detached houses as well as terraces, from Victorian through to the modern era. Crystal Palace starts at the top of the hill from which all these areas run. Anerley Hill also runs down from the Westow Hill junction. It contains large Victorian houses mainly converted into flats, and some more recent houses. It is a similar story between Anerley Road and the High Street, with flats created out of former Victorian houses. Nearby Penge and Sydenham hold a variety of property types, much of it from the 20th-century.