Great Exhibition

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, London, on the 1st of May, 1851. Six million people walked through its doors before it closed on the 15th of October, a number equivalent to a third of Britain's entire population at the time. Among them were Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. One famous figure who stayed away was the teenage William Morris, a future leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, who later said he refused to attend on the grounds of taste.

  What drew such crowds? What was this place that King Ernest Augustus of Hanover called a "folly and absurdity," and Queen Victoria visited thirty-seven times? How did a single temporary building in a London park produce three of Britain's greatest museums? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Vision Behind the Fair

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  Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, was the driving force behind the project, working alongside Henry Cole and members of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Their goal was to stage a celebration of modern industrial technology and design on a scale the world had not yet seen. The motivating spirit was partly competitive. The French Industrial Exposition of 1844 had been a highly effective showcase, and Britain's prime motive was to make clear its own role as the world's industrial leader.

  But the ambitions reached beyond national pride. Europe had just come through two difficult decades of political and social upheaval, and the organisers hoped to demonstrate that technology could be the key to a better future. The government was persuaded to form the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to assess whether such an event was even viable. The Royal Commission confirmed it was, on one important condition: the exhibition would have to pay for itself.

• 3. The Crystal Palace

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  Joseph Paxton designed the building in just nine months from planning to grand opening, drawing on his experience building greenhouses for the sixth Duke of Devonshire. It was a glass house on an almost impossible scale: 1,848 feet long by 454 feet wide, roughly 563 metres by 138 metres. Structural engineer Charles Fox provided key support, and a committee overseeing the construction included Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The cast iron frame components and nearly all the glass came from Birmingham and Smethwick.

  The interior was fitted with full-grown trees and statues, which served both to beautify the space and to dramatise the idea of human dominance over nature. Critics who had predicted the building would be an eyesore or a danger were silenced by its reception: it was hailed as an architectural marvel and an engineering triumph. The building's popular nickname, the Crystal Palace, eventually became the name of an entire neighbourhood. After the exhibition closed, the structure was dismantled, moved, and re-erected in enlarged form at Sydenham Hill in south London in 1854. It stood there until fire destroyed it on the 30th of November, 1936.

• 4. What the Exhibits Revealed

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  Thirteen thousand exhibits filled the Crystal Palace, drawn from throughout Britain, its colonies and dependencies, and forty-four foreign states. Visitors could watch the entire process of cotton production from spinning to finished cloth, examine electric telegraphs and microscopes, and observe working machinery in motion. Sophie Forgan, writing about the exhibition's arrangement, noted that trophy exhibits in the central avenue generally placed art or colonial raw materials in the most prestigious positions.

  The Koh-i-Noor diamond, meaning "Mountain of Light" and the largest known diamond in the world at the time, was the centrepiece of the India exhibit. The Tara Brooch, an early 8th-century Irish penannular brooch discovered only in 1850, was shown by the Dublin jeweller George Waterhouse alongside Celtic Revival jewellery. Frederick Bakewell used the exhibition floor to demonstrate a precursor to the fax machine. Alfred Charles Hobbs demonstrated the inadequacy of several respected door locks. William Chamberlin Jr. of Sussex exhibited what may have been the world's first voting machine, which counted votes automatically and included a system to prevent over-voting.

  The first international chess tournament, organised by Howard Staunton, took place at the exhibition. The America's Cup yachting event was instigated with a race held in conjunction with the fair. Samuel Colt demonstrated his prototype for the 1851 Colt Navy revolver alongside his older Walker and Dragoon models. Mathew Brady was awarded a medal for his daguerreotypes.

• 5. A Nation Through the Turnstiles

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  Admission prices were structured to draw as wide a public as possible. The most expensive tickets, priced at two guineas for a season pass, were aimed at the wealthy. Daily tickets started at one pound for the first two days, then dropped to five shillings, and eventually fell to one shilling on most days. That one-shilling ticket proved the most successful, with four and a half million shillings collected from attendees in that tier alone.

  The newly expanding railways played a crucial part. Rail companies offered heavily discounted fares for travellers coming from distant parts of the country, and special rates were arranged for groups, often led by a local vicar. Thomas Cook arranged travel to the exhibition for 150,000 people, and the event was a pivotal moment in the development of his company. For the very poorest, who could not afford the fare at any price, there was a different kind of spectacle: they lined up along the rail tracks to watch the long trains of open carriages steaming past. Average daily attendance reached 42,831, and on the 7th of October the figure peaked at 109,915.

• 6. The Penny and the Palace

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  George Jennings installed the world's first modern public flush toilets at the exhibition, and 827,280 visitors paid a penny fee to use them. The toilets remained in place even after the exhibition was dismantled. The phrase "spending a penny" became a lasting euphemism for using a public lavatory. The first permanent public lavatories in Britain opened in 1852, a direct consequence of the exhibition's demonstration of the idea.

  Schweppes, identified as the world's first soft drink, was the official sponsor of the event. Visitors bought stereoscope cards, lithographic paper souvenirs hand-coloured and held together by cloth, which gave a three-dimensional view of the exhibition when seen through peep holes on the front cover. These allowed people to relive the experience after returning home. Two thousand five hundred tickets were printed for the opening day, and all of them were sold.

• 7. The Surplus and Its Legacy

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  When the accounts were settled, the Great Exhibition had generated a surplus of £186,000, a figure equivalent to more than thirty-three million pounds in 2023 values. The organisers directed the money toward a cluster of new institutions built on land to the south of the exhibition site. That area became known as Albertopolis. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum all grew from this single financial windfall. The Imperial Institute was built there too.

  A portion of the remaining surplus was used to establish an educational trust providing grants and scholarships for industrial research, a trust that continues to operate today. The Albert Memorial, located behind the Royal Albert Hall, commemorates Prince Albert's role in the exhibition. Its inscription carries statistics from the event itself: the number of visitors, the number of British and foreign exhibitors, and the profit made. The exhibition's illustrated catalogue, filled with steel engravings, survives as one of the primary sources for the study of High Victorian design.