The rise of FIA Formula E and other electric genres has brought world-class car racing to city streets globally. Conversely, closed-circuit racing in the outskirts of capitals is a fading commodity. Crystal Palace, which hosted its final meeting 50 years ago this month, offered just that and a tourist attraction for the Greater London Council.
Seven miles from London’s Palace of Westminster (aka the Houses of Parliament), situated in parkland on a high point to the south-east of the conurbation boasting panoramic views, the much-missed venue first reverberated to the beat of motorcycle engines in 1927. Ten years later Siam’s Prince Bira (ERA R2B ‘Romulus’) won the London Grand Prix on a metalled two-mile circuit. Alas, Sir Joseph Paxton’s extraordinary prefabricated iron-framed glass pavilion for which it was named – built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, then transplanted to the Penge Place estate at Sydenham, where it was reopened within three years – burned to the ground in 1936. An event your scribe’s mother, then five, remembers!
Speeds continued to rise on the two-mile circuit, where Bira and Raymond
