In 1852 Sir Joseph Paxton was faced with a problem of gargantuan proportions; where to relocate his magnificent glass palace which had been home to The Great Exhibition for the past year?

When the great palace doors had been opened to the public on  May Day 1851 none could have predicted the overwhelming success it was to be. Hundreds of thousands of visitors descended upon Hyde Park to see ‘The Wonders of The Empire’, housed within ‘A Wonder of The Empire’ . However the Crystal Palace was only intended to be an attraction for a year, and in 1852 Parliament decreed that it be dismantled or re-located.

The overwhelming consensus of opinion from the general public was that the palace should stay and so Paxton began to draw up a list of possible sites that could be a suitable home for the new Palace.  The list was a relatively short one comprising of Highgate  Hill, Battersea Marsh and North Greenwich. However one by one Paxton was forced to cross them off his list; local residents in Highgate were strongly opposed to the idea of ‘commoners’ tramping about their beautiful North london idyll and hastily formed a Trust which purchased the land Paxton was considering for the development. The land at Battersea Marsh also proved problematic; for centuries the area had been used as a dumping ground by London’s cheese makers  wishing to off load the tons of whey they were unable to use, the result being that the land had become saturated  with the stuff; tests carried out by Paxton revealed that any  structure larger than a modest house would be sucked down within six months. Paxton also crossed North Greenwich  off his list without even bothering to investigate it; he later told friends that his decision followed a dream he had in which he saw ‘a huge unattractive white lump forlorn on a lonely Peninsula, with doors locked and mocked by all. An empty waste of space. Nothing good will come of  building a monument in that spot’.

With his list in tatters Paxton was faced with the prospect of the Crystal Palace being lost forever, however it was at this point that an acquaintance , Leo Schuster approached him, offering Paxton the chance to build on land he owned in South East London. Schuster was a railway entrepeneur and had amassed considerable tracts of land for his rail construction projects. He now generously offered Penge Place Estate to Paxton in return for sole rights to link any rail lines to the Crystal Palace once it was re-located. Paxton, realising he had been thrown a lifeline quickly accepted.

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Penge Place Estate spanned a large stretch of elevated land which went from Sydenham Hill across to Northwood. It’s 2,500 acres provided fantastic views across the Kent countryside and it provided the ideal spot for Paxton to re-build his monumental glass palace. However in his eagerness to help Paxton and secure the lucrative rail rights,there was something that Schuster had neglected to mention to Paxton; the possibility that the ground on which the Palace would be built not being strong enough to withstand the weight of such a project.

For the past decade Schuster had been burrowing through Sydenham Hill, testing and refining his excavation techniques for future rail projects. Scores of tunnels had been created, some stretched for a mile or so, others for only a couple of hundred feet, some of them Schuster had managed to link up, creating a vast network of catacombs that went on for miles. The fact was that Sydenham Hill had more holes than a block of emmantal cheese, and it was to one of Schusters tunnels that N. Odham MacGuinness and Jonty Climpson were now headed in the hope of being reunited with their beleaguered  friend Butler Smith...