The Crystal Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  The Crystal Palace held 293,000 panes of glass, and visitors who stepped inside found they needed no lamps to see. Its clear walls and ceilings let daylight pour in, and no building had ever gathered so much glass in one place. Cast iron and plate glass were its only materials. It went up in thirty-nine weeks and stood three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral. Where the name came from is uncertain. It has been suggested that the playwright Douglas Jerrold supplied it in July 1850, when he wrote in the satirical magazine Punch about the coming exhibition and imagined a "palace of very crystal". This documentary asks how a head gardener beat a field of celebrated engineers and architects. It asks how a temporary hall for a world's fair became the name of a whole district of London. And it asks how something so astonishing could be gone in a single night.

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• 2. A Gardener's Gamble

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  In January 1850 a royal commission was formed to mount the Great Exhibition, and it decided from the start that public subscription would pay for everything. A building committee followed. It included the engineers Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, the architects Charles Barry and Thomas Leverton Donaldson, and William Cubitt as chairman.

  On the 15th of March 1850 the committee invited designs with strict conditions. The building had to be temporary, simple, as cheap as possible and quick to erect, because opening day was already fixed for the 1st of May 1851.

  Some 245 entries arrived within three weeks, and 38 of them came from abroad, from places as far apart as Australia, Hanover, Switzerland and Hamburg. Two iron-and-glass schemes won praise, one by Richard Turner, co-designer of the Palm House at Kew Gardens, and one by the French architect Hector Horeau. The committee rejected every entry anyway. Turner was furious and reportedly pestered the commissioners for months, but his design was estimated at £300,000, which was too expensive.

  The committee then produced its own fallback, a brick building by Donaldson in the round-arch style with a sheet-iron dome. Newspapers ridiculed it. The site was unsettled too. Hyde Park was preferred, but Wormwood Scrubs, Battersea Park, the Isle of Dogs, Victoria Park and Regent's Park were all discussed. Opponents of the Hyde Park plan, backed by The Times, lobbied hard. The loudest was Charles Sibthorp, who called the exhibition "one of the greatest humbugs, frauds and absurdities ever known".

  Joseph Paxton then took an interest, with the enthusiastic backing of the commission member Henry Cole. Paxton was head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House and a freelance garden designer. His public gardens at Birkenhead Park had directly influenced the design of New York's Central Park.

  At Chatsworth he had spent years experimenting with glasshouses built from standard sheets of glass, laminated wood and prefabricated cast iron. His Great Stove of 1836 covered around 28,000 square feet and was then the largest glass building in the world. A decade later came the Lily House, built for the giant waterlily Victoria amazonica. The first specimen to reach England had struggled at Kew, so Paxton was invited to take it to Chatsworth. There it thrived, and in 1849 he produced the first flowers of the species grown in England. Newspapers drew his daughter Alice standing on one of its leaves. Paxton later cited those huge ribbed floating leaves as a key inspiration for the Crystal Palace.

  On the 9th of June 1850 Paxton left a meeting with Cole and walked the Hyde Park site at once. Two days later, during a Midland Railway board meeting, he doodled his concept on a sheet of pink blotting paper. That sketch, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, held every basic feature of the finished building. Detailed plans, calculations and costings were ready in less than two weeks.

  His budget was a remarkably low £85,800, only 28 percent of Turner's estimate. Its footprint of more than 770,000 square feet would cover roughly 25 times the ground of the Great Stove. The contractor Fox, Henderson and Co submitted a low construction bid, and in July 1850 the commission publicly endorsed Paxton's scheme. He now had less than eight months to finalize plans, make the parts and build.

  He made one late change. He added a high barrel-vaulted transept across the middle so that several large elm trees could stand inside rather than be felled. That also answered a major complaint from the anti-exhibition lobby. In Perth, Scotland, a statue of Albert, Prince Consort, shows him holding a plan of the finished building, and Queen Victoria unveiled it in 1864.

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• 3. Design and Assembly

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  Chance Brothers of Smethwick made the largest glass panes then available, each 10 inches wide and 49 inches long, and Paxton scaled the entire building around them. Because nearly every roof and wall surface could use identical panes, production cost and installation time both fell sharply.

  His basic roofing unit was a long triangular prism, which was light, strong and thrifty with materials. He used the 49-inch pane as the sloping side of a right-angled triangle with a 4-foot base. Mirroring it gave 8-foot gables, and each prism was 24 feet long. Three prisms side by side, carried on cast iron beams and slim iron pillars, formed a 24-foot cube. This was the module of the whole building.

  The finished ground plan measured 1848 feet by 456 feet, a grid 77 modules long and 19 wide. Because each module supported itself, Paxton could omit some to create larger spaces for big exhibits. The central gallery was 72 feet wide and 1800 feet long. The barrel-vaulted transept rose 168 feet at the top of its arch.

  Water was a danger on such a roof. Rain ran into U-shaped timber channels at the base of each furrow, and these channels were the rails for the glaziers' trolleys during construction. Afterward they served as both joists and gutters, a patented design now known as the Paxton gutter. The water then passed into larger gutters and down hollow cast iron columns that doubled as concealed downpipes.

  One problem Paxton never fully solved. Rain leaked in at over a thousand places, and the poor sealants of the day meant putty only partly cured it.

  Heat was the opposite worry, with no electricity or air-conditioning available in 1851. Canvas shade-cloths stretched across the roof ridges cut heat and softened the light. They also worked as a crude cooler when sprayed with water. Louvres in the outer walls opened by gears to release hot stale air. The floorboards, 22 centimetres wide and spaced about a centimetre apart, let cooler air rise through the gaps as the hot air escaped.

  Those gaps also let dust and litter fall to the ground, where a team of cleaning boys collected it daily. Paxton designed sweeping machines as well, yet the trailing skirts of female visitors were found to do the job well.

  Fox, Henderson and Co took possession of the site in July 1850. Their hoardings were built from timber that later became the finished floorboards. More than 5,000 navvies worked on the project, with up to 2,000 on site at the peak. More than 1,000 iron columns carried 2,224 trellis girders and 30 miles of guttering, some 4,000 tons of iron in all.

  There were no powered cranes. Workers raised columns and girders with shear legs, two poles lashed at the top and held upright by guy ropes. Steam-powered machines on site grooved the wooden sash bars, and a painting machine dipped the parts in paint and passed them through rotating brushes. The 16 semi-circular ribs of the transept were the only major wooden structural parts, and all were fixed in a week. A team of 80 men could fix more than 18,000 panes of glass in a week.

  John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University has argued that the speed owed much to nuts and bolts made to what became the British Standard Whitworth. Before then, nuts and bolts were made individually and could not be swapped.

  Paxton was knighted for the work, as was Charles Fox, director of the ironwork contractor. Because the light concrete footings were never removed, they still lie just beneath the surface of the site today.

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• 4. The Great Exhibition

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  On the 1st of May 1851 Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition, the first of the world's fairs of culture and industry. Some 100,000 objects were displayed along more than ten miles. Britain filled half the display space with exhibits from home and the empire, and France was the largest foreign contributor.

  Exhibits fell into four categories: Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufacturers and Fine Arts. They ranged from the Koh-i-Noor diamond, Sèvres porcelain and music organs to a massive hydraulic press and a fire engine. A 27-foot Crystal Fountain stood at the centre among the elms.

  Tickets cost £1 in the first week. The price then fell to five shillings for three weeks, still high enough to keep most of the public out. On the 26th of May weekday admission dropped to one shilling, and working-class visitors finally arrived. Fridays cost two shillings and sixpence, and Saturdays stayed at five shillings. More than six million admissions were counted at the toll-gates, though how many were repeat visits is not known.

  The event made a surplus of £186,000. That money founded the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.

  The building also had the first major public toilets, the Retiring Rooms, where the sanitary engineer George Jennings installed his "Monkey Closet" flushing lavatory. Some 827,280 visitors paid one penny each to use them. Many assume the phrase "spending a penny" began here, but it more likely dates from the 1890s, when coin-operated locks appeared on public lavatories.

  The exhibition closed on the 15th of October 1851, but its life was always meant to last only six months. What would happen to the building next remained undecided.

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• 5. Sydenham Hill

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  A consortium of eight businessmen, including Samuel Laing and Leo Schuster of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, formed a holding company to save the building. Over the wishes of parliamentary opponents, they proposed moving it to Penge Place, at the top of Sydenham Hill.

  Rebuilding began in 1852, and the result was a different structure that reused most of the old parts. The main gallery gained a barrel-vaulted roof, the central transept grew larger and higher, and a new facade with terraces and stairways framed the grand entrance arch. The new building measured 1608 feet long and 384 feet across the transepts, and it sat several metres above the grounds. Philip Henry Delamotte photographed the reconstruction, while Negretti and Zambra produced stereographs of the interior and grounds.

  On the 10th of June 1854 Queen Victoria again performed the opening, before 40,000 guests. Emma Darwin, wife of Charles Darwin, wrote in her diary that day, "Opening Crystal Pal".

  Two railway stations served the site. The High Level station, designed by Edward Middleton Barry for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, was linked to the entrance by a subway under the Parade with Italian mosaic roofing. The Low Level station, built by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, still operates off Anerley Road.

  The site straddled a boundary. The building reached beyond Penge Place, which was also the line between Surrey and Kent, and in 1899 the county boundary moved to put the whole site in Penge Urban District in Kent.

  The grounds cost considerably more than the rebuilt Palace. Edward Milner designed the Italian Garden and fountains, the Great Maze and the English Landscape Garden. Raffaele Monti made much of the statuary around the fountain basins. The sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built 33 life-sized models of newly discovered dinosaurs and other extinct animals.

  Paxton's passion for fountains outran his water supply. The two main jets rose 250 feet, and his water towers collapsed under the weight of the water in their raised tanks. Brunel was consulted and planned two mighty towers, one at each end of the building, fed from three reservoirs. When the fountains opened, a gust of wind blew spray over the royal carriage and the Queen got wet.

  The Palace did not stay a gallery for long. Its programme soon filled with concerts, shows and spectacles of every kind.

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• 6. Pleasure and War

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  In the central transept stood a 4,000-piece Grand Orchestra built around a Great Organ of 4,500 pipes. A concert room seating over 4,000 hosted the Handel Festivals for many years, and August Manns ran the Crystal Palace Concerts from 1855 until 1901.

  The tightrope walker Charles Blondin performed daring feats in the transept, which once housed a circus. On the 7th of October 1857 Charles Spurgeon preached without amplification to 23,654 people. Giuseppe Garibaldi was welcomed with a concert in 1864, and the Shah of Persia received a grand fête in 1889.

  Across the decades the Palace also staged firsts. In 1868 it held the world's first aeronautical exhibition. In 1871 Harrison Weir organised the world's first cat show there. It later hosted dog, pigeon, honey and flower shows and the first national motor show. In 1875 the game later called the world's first bandy match was played there, then named "hockey on the ice".

  The Palace also served as a teaching venue. Experts such as Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones created courts telling the history of fine art, including Egyptian, Alhambra, Roman, Renaissance, Pompeian and Grecian courts, and Augustus Pugin's Mediaeval Court. In the year of reopening, 18 handbooks were published as guides, many written by the specialists behind the displays. Hawkins's dinosaurs had their own guide, with text by Richard Owen.

  In 1909 Robert Baden-Powell noticed girls' interest in Scouting while attending a Boy Scout meeting at the Palace. That observation later led to the Girl Guides and then the Girl Scouts. Two years later the Festival of Empire marked the coronation of George V and Mary, with large pavilions built for and by the Dominions. Canada's replicated the Parliament in Ottawa.

  In the First World War the Palace became a naval training establishment, HMS Victory VI, informally called HMS Crystal Palace. More than 125,000 men from the Royal Naval Division, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and the Royal Naval Air Service trained there. From the 1st of April 1918 the site became RAF Crystal Palace under the newly created Royal Air force.

  On the 14th of January 1919 it opened dispersal centres for the Army and the RAF, processing returning troops with administration, medical checks and de-kitting. Then it became the first home of the Imperial War Museum, launched in 1920 as the Imperial War Museum and Great Victory Exhibition. The museum moved to South Kensington in 1924.

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• 7. Debt and Fire

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  The original Palace cost £150,000, but the move to Sydenham cost £1,300,000, and the company never repaid that debt. Sundays made it worse. Many people worked every day but Sunday, yet the Lord's Day Observance Society objected to Sunday opening. The Palace did open on Sundays by 1860, and 40,000 visitors came on one Sunday in May 1861.

  By the 1890s, stalls and booths had made the Palace a much more downmarket attraction. After the Festival of Empire the building fell into disrepair, and in 1911 bankruptcy was declared. Robert Windsor-Clive, 1st Earl of Plymouth, bought it for £230,000 to save it from developers, expecting a fund raised by the Lord Mayor of London to repay him.

  The mayor announced in 1913 that £90,000 was still needed. The Times launched an appeal and raised the amount in 13 days, with £30,000 from one unknown individual. Camberwell Borough Council refused to contribute, and Penge Urban District Council cut its pledge from £20,000 to £5,000. The Earl covered a shortfall of some £30,000.

  In the 1920s a board of trustees was set up under manager Sir Henry Buckland, who set about restoring the decaying building. Visitors returned and the Palace made a small profit again. Buckland and his staff also improved the fountains and gardens, including Thursday evening fireworks displays by Brocks.

  On the evening of the 30th of November 1936, Buckland was walking his dog near the Palace with his daughter Crystal, named after the building. They noticed a red glow inside. He found two employees fighting a small office fire that had started after an explosion in the women's cloakroom. Seeing how serious it was, they called the Penge fire brigade.

  Eighty-nine fire engines and over 400 firemen arrived and could not put it out. High winds, dry old timber flooring and a huge quantity of flammable material fed the blaze. Within hours the Palace was destroyed, and the glow could be seen across eight counties.

  Buckland said, "In a few hours we have seen the end of the Crystal Palace. Yet it will live in the memories not only of Englishmen, but the whole world". Around 100,000 people came to Sydenham Hill to watch, and Winston Churchill was among them. He said, "This is the end of an age". As in 1866, when the north transept burnt, the insurance was inadequate to cover rebuilding, which would have cost at least £2 million.

  The television pioneer John Logie Baird had used the South Tower and much of the lower level for mechanical television experiments, and much of his work was lost. Baird reportedly suspected sabotage, but the true cause of the fire remains unknown. The last singer to perform there before the fire was the Australian contralto Essie Ackland.

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• 8. Afterlife

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  After the fire only the two water towers and a damaged section of the north nave remained. The south tower came down soon afterward because its damage threatened nearby houses, and Thos. W. Ward Ltd. of Sheffield dismantled the Palace. The north tower was demolished with explosives in 1941. It was rumoured that the aim was to remove a landmark for German aircraft, though Luftwaffe bombers actually found central London by following the Thames.

  During the war the grounds served as a manufacturing base for aircraft radar screens and other advanced equipment, a secret kept until well after the war. The High Level station closed in 1954. A motor racing circuit ran in the park from 1927 to 1972, but residents disliked the noise, and a high court judgment regulated racing hours. In the mid-1950s the Crystal Palace transmitting station was built on the former aquarium site, and it still serves as one of London's main television masts.

  The surrounding residential area was renamed Crystal Palace after the landmark. The park holds the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, formerly a football stadium that hosted the FA Cup Final from 1895 to 1914. Crystal Palace F.C. was founded at the site. Hawkins's dinosaurs still stand in the park.

  Since the 1960s the Crystal Palace Bowl, a natural amphitheatre in the park's northern corner, has staged open-air summer concerts. Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Elton John, Eric Clapton and The Beach Boys played there. Ian Ritchie designed an award-winning permanent stage in 1997, but the venue has been inactive for years and the stage has decayed. In 2020 the base and foundation of the south tower were given historic status, near the Crystal Palace Museum on Anerley Hill.

  The building also lived on in literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky visited London during the Exhibition of 1862 and wrote about the Palace in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and in Notes from Underground. He saw it as a monument to soulless modern society and the myth of progress. In What Is to Be Done?, Nikolay Chernyshevsky treated it instead as the birthplace of a new social order guided by reason. At Magic Kingdom Park, the Crystal Palace restaurant opened on the 1st of October 1971, named after Paxton's building.

  Proposals for rebuilding the site keep arriving and failing. In December 2010 the London Development Agency won approval for a £67.5 million refurbishment, then withdrew before approval was announced. In 2013 the Chinese company ZhongRong Holdings held early talks about rebuilding the Palace on the north side of the park, but its exclusivity agreement with Bromley council lapsed in February 2015. Regeneration work on the Italian Terraces below the Palace site began in May 2025 and is expected to be largely finished by late summer 2026.

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