Welcome to the project

This website is dedicated to our Crystal Palace Project, which revolves around our wish to investigate what it feels like to recreate the past by recreating our own small section of the giant Crystal Palace built in Sydenham  in 1854. The section we work with was called the Pompeian Court and was a complete life-size model of an ancient Roman house, housing a collection of copies of Roman paintings. The house and the paintings were based on the ruins preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in the Roman town of Pompeii. It was destroyed when the Palace burnt down in 1936. Phase 1 of our project was funded by JISC and involved building a virtual 3D model of the Court in Second Life, which housed a digitised collection of the material that was in it.  

Having built and trialled the model with various user groups, we are now entering Phase 2 of the project. Supported by the University of Bristol’s Impact Development Fund, we are concentrating on making our model more accessible and user-friendly so that we can maximise the usefulness of our model and share the resources we have built up. Our twin focuses are the education and heritage sectors. We are working with our partner school, Chantry High School in Ipswich, to create a series of learning activities for Year 10 students, working in and around the model and also looking for partners in the Crystal Palace area in order to make the model accessible to the local community and visitors to the park. 

We are currently revamping the content of the website to reflect the second phase of the project. In the meantime, though,  you can find out about Phase 1 through the relevant web pages and blog (see links on the right) as well as catch up with progress on the new blog. Our project is all about sharing ideas and knowledge so we’re always very glad to receive any comments or feedback, so please do get in touch by leaving a comment below.

Nic and Shelley (Lucien & Gwendoline)