Dan Snow's History Hit - The Crystal Palace

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was something to behold for the 6 million Victorian patrons who travelled to London's Hyde Park to see it. It was a triumphant showcase of the most extraordinary achievements of the Victorian age from industry, culture and engineering - gathered from all four corners of the globe. As visitors walked the 8 miles of exhibitions, they would have seen everything from the sublime to the absurd: the world’s largest diamond, a contraption to predict the weather using leeches, the world's first public flushing toilets and a two-person piano.The enormous glass and iron building that housed the exhibition was big enough to house four St Pauls Cathedrals and its construction involved some of the most famous engineers of the Victorian age - Brunel, Faraday, Stephenson and Paxton.To tell Dan the story of the Crystal Palace is historian and conservationist Steven Brindle.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Tim Arstall.You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was the biggest international exhibition to that point in history. Housed in a building of unimaginable size, in the very heart of the world's biggest city. The capital of Earth's most dynamic economy. One in the throes of a revolution in how things were made and powered and moved. It was the Great Exhibition of 1851, an unambiguous celebration of industry and science and engineering and progress. A party thrown by a society who almost couldn't believe what they were experiencing. It was put on by a committee of geniuses, both political and scientific, and at its heart was a structure unlike any other ever seen before on this planet, made possible only by very recent

revolutionary changes in methods of producing glass and iron. They built the largest man-made enclosed space in the world, one larger than any other that ever existed. It was 18 acres, that's around 10 soccer pitches, football pitches. There were over 3,000 columns, there were over 2,000 girders holding the whole thing together. And the extraordinary thing, it was all built in five months, well within the exhibition's budget. It was designed to house the wonders of the industrial world from Britain, its empire, and other nations. And it was designed to show them off to visitors, not just from Britain, but around the world. It was envisaged that those visitors would take advantage of new steamships.

They would travel across the oceans in unprecedented safety and speed. They would then be whisked to London on the railways, the Iron Road. This was truly a new world. And those visitors, boy did they come. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. The poet Tennyson, the author Charles Darwin, the historian and political scientist Karl Marx, the author Charlotte Bronte, exiled French royals. Anyone who was anyone, I think, certainly in Western Europe. Duke of Wellington was there. Duke of Wellington, imagine that. He was in his 80s. Born before the birth of the United States of America. The victor of Waterloo. A trespasser from a world of wood and stone in a palace of iron and glass. What they saw amazed them. Not least,

by the way, the facilities. They all have the option of using the first public flushing toilets in Britain, known as monkey closets. We should bring back that phrase. It was a spectacular success. It was an encapsulation of Britain. I think possibly the exact point when its lead over the rest of the world in industrial terms, engineering terms, was at its most stark. Here tells all about the Great Exhibition. Here's the historian Stephen Brindle, great to have him back on the podcast. He's going to tell me about the exhibition. He's going to tell me about its genesis, its execution, but also its legacy, how it endures both in a very general sense, but also in some very particular ways too.

Here it is, folks, the grand exhibition. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast.

Dan, thank you very much. Every way you go at the moment, every time I land in any city anywhere around the world, there's an expo or a this and a that and a this and a that. Now, is that a new phenomenon? In 1851, was that something people would be familiar with? No, not at all, Dan. Britain was the first industrial society, and we were producing mass-produced manufactured goods at scale. But imported goods were relatively rare and were restricted to certain categories, you know, rugs from the East, porcelain from France.

And there were issues about getting British goods exported overseas and about people wanting to see the range of foreign sort of manufacturers that might be. And there were concerns about the quality of British design. How good is it really? And so people were starting to think about industrial design and export. But there were no big exhibitions at that stage, and the idea had to be invented. So what was the genesis? It was trade, was it? Because, I mean, you hear about Prince Albert being involved, and it's a royal do. It all seems a bit grubby, just trying to flog a few bits of old iron. I mean,

it feels quite modern, that. The Society of Arts got involved, but they held modest exhibitions of manufactured goods because they wanted to help British manufacturers, give them somewhere to show off their goods in London. But they were really quite small. And their secretary was a man called Henry Cole, keeper of the public records, one of those extraordinary workaholic Victorians. He was the inventor of the Christmas card, amongst many other things. And he came up with the idea of having a really big exhibition. Part of the problem here was that the French had similar manufacture exhibitions in Paris, and theirs were better. So Carroll thought, well, we should do something about this.

We need to scale up. And he got the Prince Consort involved. Prince Albert, serious-minded, intelligent, looking for a role. Queen Victoria wouldn't let him in on the meetings with the Prime Minister, as we know. And so Prince Albert and Cole formed an unlikely but very powerful alliance. And the prince's support, above all, guaranteed that doors would open for Cole with this crazy idea for a really big exhibition of manufacturers. And without him, something like this would probably have been kicked into long grass by the government. I never cease to be amazed by the fact that when you're digging around in some strange bit of British life, quite rapidly you discover the root cause of it all, which is the Anglo-French competition.

It's fascinating, isn't it? So it's an exhibition. You're showing off British goods. That's great. It's an age of industry. Everyone's wowed at these new gizmos and devices and widgets. Who's the audience? Is it a British internal audience? Are you hoping to attract foreigners? We are hoping for a world audience, Dan. A bit more background here. On the one hand, Britain has just built 5,000 miles of railway.

The railway mania has happened. And so there is internal transport of a kind which has only existed very recently. And the idea that millions of people might come to an event in London, more than a few thousands, has suddenly become a reality. And there are now steam packets going to France. So overseas visitors can come too. So that's one thing. so so overseas visitors can come too so that's one thing uh another thing is that um harvests have improved and the decade called the hungry 40s are over and europe is feeling prosperous again and another is that an era of great political instability from 1846 the year of revolutions 1848 and so there's a sense that britain and Europe feel that they've moved past a whole series of

great crises and there's a feeling of optimism and economies in Britain throughout Europe are growing again and I think that's quite an important part of the background because this couldn't have happened in the late 1840s because they were convulsed with political crisis and Britain is able to welcome foreign visitors um on a scale that could never been visited before because of the railways and it is looking to increase its export markets and so it is definitely looking for overseas people to come and see what we can do yes all of that wow so they're going to get steamships over from the continent. They're going to get whizzed up from Dover to London on the train. It's just a new world. We think we've been lived through technological change. I mean, the people organising this were

born in an era of horse and carriage and sail-powered ships. Well, indeed. And the Prince Consort's interest, I think, was really what generated the step change and meant the government had to take it seriously. And so when a Royal Commission was established in January 1850, it included the Prince, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell and Lord Derby, that is past, present and future prime ministers, were all on the Royal Commission. And there was an executive committee which included Henry Cole and Sir William Cubitt who was probably London's biggest builder developer and Robert Stevenson who was the greatest engineer of the age so because of the prints it had very good representation but where was it going to be? It happened to be in London they needed a really big building and so the almost

the only site for it was Hyde Park. Straight away they're thinking this, this is going to be, we're going to do a big scale. Why can't they just have it in sort of Burlington Arcade or something? This is from the beginning going to be massive, is it? Because from the beginning, they were thinking really, really big. And this is an aspect I don't quite understand. How do you work out how big an exhibition of the manufacturers of all nations is going to be? Well, what they ended up with was a building that covered 18 acres. So they must have got there quite quickly between the beginning of 1850 and the summer,

by which time they'd have had expressions of interest, you know, via British consulates around Europe and actually around the world. They would have had an idea of how many square feet of exhibition space everyone wanted. And so half of this was going to be Britain and the British Empire and half was going to be the rest of the world and the answer that they ended up with apparently was 18 acres of enclosed space so it would merely involve the largest enclosed structure ever built in history. That is swaggering confidence as well it's like invite the rest of the world so you're not you're not just trying to show off British

manufacturing you're like hey listen you got good stuff bring it along we're at the absolute zenith of britain's industrial lead at this point aren't we and the corn laws have been repealed there's a confidence around free trade anything anyone can make we can compete with them yeah absolutely that is how they felt um and a measure of their confidence is that although they realize they're going to need this gigantic building they didn't really know at first how they were going to build the gigantic building or what it would cost or whether they could do it within their budget which was about a hundred thousand pounds mind you a hundred thousand went a lot further in those days they had a great british institution they had a competition yeah yeah they had a competition there were 250 entries but none of them seemed to be buildable for anything like a hundred thousand pounds and

most of them looked pretty permanent really like massive great new building in Hyde Park made of iron and brick I mean it's a proper yeah a proper building yeah a proper building because they thought to be that big it would have to be and so their own building committee which included robert stevenson and isabel kingdom brunel and william cubitt produced their own design which still had a massive outer shell and a great big iron and glass stone which seems to be brunel's contribution it would taken over 10 million bricks um and it was vehemently criticized and it was still rather unclear whether you could build a structure involving 10 million bricks in under a year, which is what they had by then. So by the summer, the whole idea was looking like it might fold and Brunel on the committee together, I mean, three of the greatest engineers in world history is just extraordinary. And I love the idea of the three prime ministers taking the political heat for as well. I mean, this is a serious, I guess this is why the job got done, because this was a very, very serious, you know, and and team behind it they had really set themselves up potentially for one massive failure was the thing i guess at this point once you've announced this

thing you can't have a good tab this thing flop or go pear-shaped you've announced the date have you as well i think they'd announced may 1851 for the opening by then right so you've got a problem you've got to get a building and yeah for people not listening to this in the UK, the weather in May, it can be very nice, but you wouldn't want to have an outdoor festival with lots of delicate bits of engineering and technology necessarily under the blue skies of London in May. design. Even Brunel, Stevenson and Sir William Cubitt had not been able to produce one. And the idea was in jeopardy. And so it was saved by another of those extraordinary Victorians, who's a man called Joseph Paxton. He was self-educated and he began his career as a gardener's boy. But he was a gardener's boy at Chatsworth, the great home of the Duke of Devonshire. And he rose to be the head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, and he was a self-taught engineer and architect. He was self-taught everything, Paxton, really,

and he designed glass houses for the Duke, who liked to grow rare species. There was a lily house, and then there was a really huge one called the Great Stove. And Paxton, who, remember, was a completely self-educated man, worked with Midlands manufacturers to devise a new system of glazing which could be manufactured at scale for these huge greenhouses he was building at Chatsworth, which had been some time before. The Great Stove was about 1836 to 1840. So Paxton became the Duke of Devonshire's right-hand man. He was such a brilliant, hard-working, 16-hour-a-day Victorian kind of guy, and he represented the Duke's interests on the board of the Midland Railway. And because he read the papers and he'd heard

about the troubles the 1851 exhibition was having, and he was at a boring board meeting of the Midland Railway, and he did a doodle on his blotting pad and so Paxton had an idea that what he needed was the world's biggest greenhouse and he went to London and he got someone to introduce him to Henry Cole and he paced the site and he went back to North Wales where he attended the floating of one of the trusses for Robert Stevenson's Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait. And then he went back to Chatsworth and he spent nine days with his staff there making designs. And on the 20th of June, he set out for London with his design.

And Paxton met Robert Stevenson by chance at Derby Station. They both attended the floating of the trusses for Stevenson's Bridge. And Paxton shows some designers and said just i've just knocked this together thought you might be interested and stevenson took him seaco and they said this is a thousand times better than anything which has been brought before us and so a month later on the 26th of july the design was adopted by the commission that's a streamlined commissioning process. A streamlined commission process is just the way to put it, yeah. The design was published in the Illustrated London News and Punch christened it the Crystal Palace and the name stuck.

This is untested technology on the most enormous scale at the heart of the imperial capital, having invited the rest of the world to come and check it out i mean this could not be more risky uh it was certainly kind of risky it in a way wasn't as risky as all that because there were it was built on very solid technical technological foundations um which paxton understood as well as anyone because of his specific experience and there were two companies in the picture without whom it wouldn't have been possible and one was a firm of glass makers called chance brothers who are based at smethwick and they'd invented a new means of making cylinder glass at scale now as you and your listeners probably know historically the way in which you made sheets

of glass was to to blow sheets um on the end of a long tube um and you'd hope to blow quite a big sheet you might be able to cut some little panes off it um but the other newer method was to make a cylinder of glass please don't ask me to explain how they do that and you cut the cylinder on one side and while the glass is still in a ductile state you flatten it out and chance brothers invented a new means of doing this at much larger scale and they could make a panes which were up to about two feet wide i think but in quite long strips so that's how the duke of devonshire had been able to glaze his enormous green clouds at chatsworth and the other company were iron

founders, and they were called Fox Henderson and Company. And they're really one of the most remarkable companies in all history, because they had works also, as it happened at Smethwick in the East Midlands, where about 2000 of their workforce made iron castings and forgings. And in particular, what they made was pre-fabricated buildings and those buildings just just to interrupt there what those those buildings what they would be structures to erect in gardens or used for the military or industrial these were mainly more industrial things because the railways generated a large need for quite wide-span roofs good sheds engine sh engine sheds, locomotive repair sheds,

carriage sheds, needed to be rebuilt to roof really large buildings quite quickly. And so what Fox Henderson did was they made prefabricated roof trusses and roof frames, and sometimes frames held buildings. And the other thing they'd learned how to do was to build widespread roof that is about 100 feet wide to span the slipways in Royal Naval dockyards. Because if you could build a ship or repair a ship undercover, so it wasn't getting rained on the whole time, the whole thing went much better. And Fox Henderson were one of two companies that knew how to make wide-span prefabricated roofs in naval yards. And there were a couple of places where they remain. I think there's one in Pembroke, and there's one or two of theirs

in what was the naval dockyard at Deptford, a place now called Convoy's Wharf. And so they had really unparalleled expertise in large-scale prefabricated iron construction. And the only reason that Paxton could say, I can deliver this, is because he knew Fox Henderson and Company and Chance Brothers very well indeed. So there's just a coming together, not only, I mean, at every point of this story, there's a coalescing, there's a coming together of different technologies that just make this possible at exactly this moment in time yeah absolutely what um paxton had devised with his staff at chatsworth in nine days um was a design for a vast glass house three stories high um and he could do this because um these companies, he knew they could make it,

but it still had to be a new design. It was based on a module, which was based on the biggest pane of glass that he knew Transbrothers could make, and there'd be a modular system for making the glazing in a system which was known as Paxton roofing, which is like a ridge and furrow system, so the roof goes slightly up and down,

framed in wood. It had to do that so it would drain the weather efficiently. And the iron frame, there's a limited number of standardized parts, which could be made one, two or three stories high and reproduced almost indefinitely. But it sort of started with the widest pane of glass that chance brothers could make. And the modules sort of started

with that and the design was really much as much about the techniques used and how it could be made in parts delivered by train and wagon and assembled on site and there were further elements of the design which they they developed as they went along like the design for glazing it involved cars running on temporary tracks along the roof of the building and the design for drainage of the vast roof through the columns that really had to be developed as they went along because 18 acres is going to catch a lot of rain and so the design is partly it partly to do with the techniques by how it's made and it partly had to be improvised as they went along but it was a miracle of organization design um it was uh the largest enclosed space that had ever been built in the world with

3,330 columns and 2,224 girders and it was 1,848 feet long and 456 wide that's about 563 meters long and it was built in five months flat by 5 000 laborers it was built in five months the biggest enclosed space in history i it's hard to believe isn't it it is hard to believe and don't tell me it was on budget i can't cope with that it was built at a total cost of 89 000,000, and their budget for the building was £100,000. So it was incredible speed. It came in well under the budget. Right. Okay. And was it supposed to be temporary?

Yes. Yeah. And it was. It was dismantled afterwards and rebuilt. So the building was a huge success. Did it get a bit hot in there? I mean, when everyone was packed in? Tell me about the exhibition itself. I mean, when everyone was packed in. Tell me about the exhibition itself. Well, there were problems and there were criticisms and there were opponents. People said the crowds of people would spread cholera and they said there would be riots

and they said there'd be revolutions with so many people coming together and the crowds would threaten public morals and they said the Heathrow building would make people people faint and then there were rather more realistic criticisms this is a very english one which related to the trees in hyde park and they were going to have to fell about six or seven large trees and people weren't happy about that so the building had to be given a big cross transept with an arched roof which actually greatly improved its appearance, in order to house a number of big trees. And so the building was built around these big trees,

but there were birds nesting in the trees, which were trapped inside the building. And they realised that they'd trapped several hundred birds inside the Crystal Palace at quite a late stage, which were going to poo all over the exhibits. Oh, right. And how did they get rid of those? Well, they couldn't use slingshots, of course, or shotguns and glass. The commissioners were going out of their minds, and Prince Albert tells Queen Victoria, as it might be, over the breakfast table, and she said, send for the Duke of Wellington,

who was duly sent for. And the Queen explained the problem to him and he said simply, try Sparrowhawk's mum. That's brilliant. So, I mean, the Victor of Waterloo brings a bit of old-school wisdom. It's not like he was suggesting anything. Old-school common sense. No one had thought of that until the Duke of Wellington was called in.

So the Duke of Wellington's last great victory? Was over the London Sparrow, yeah, and saved the Great Exhibition. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More on the Great Exhibition coming up after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So they dealt with the birds and the bird poo problem. The other great British tradition is everyone saying something's going to be rubbish and then swooning for it when it actually happens. Do you get that typical profile here? Yes, indeed.

There's a rather wonderful passage in the letter by the Prince Consort in which he goes through all of the terrible things which people predicted would happen. And, of course, it was a triumphant success. And on the opening on the 1st of May in 1851, was attended by 24,000 people, amassed choirs sang, and Queen Victoria opened the exhibition. And she wrote, the tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building with all its decorations and exhibits. All this was indeed moving in a day to live forever god bless my

dearest albus and my dear country which has shown itself so great today uh and she came another 22 times so so queen victoria obviously really enjoyed it so she wants to go have a proper look around all the yeah yeah there's a lot to see too well do you tell me how much was there to see so you go in is it just what it's like a presumably at the time revolutionary but now familiar like a modern trade show or a modern exhibition is this what the stalls um yeah there are lots of really fine contemporary views watercoloured views uh so if listeners just google great exhibition 1851 and go to images you'll find lots of them um you're picturing an enormous enormous glass roof building uh with one very long main nave it's about a third of a mile long

and there it's three stories high so there are upper galleries on each side and this main nave runs a whole length and there's a big cross transept with an arch roof which goes higher which has trees and the simple and effective color scheme whereby the columns yellow and blue and the girders are blue and there were four basic categories raw materials machinery manufacturers and fine art and each class had a jewelry and the jewelries awarded prizes and there was huge catalog of winners awarded at the end and there was a separate machine hall with a boiler house so that they could um display steam powered machinery of all kinds running and lots of people bought season ticket and went back again and again because there was so much to see and countries like france and

germany and uh and russia and the united states and what were then territories of the British Empire, most notably India, took great sections of it and displayed exhibitions. And each of these would have been like a super crowded department store or trade fair. So there was really a huge amount to see. And tell me some of the highlights. And what were people talking about? What were people surprised by? Oh, early photographs in particular.

They've really been invented. Some of the first early photographs in existence are of the exhibition taken by Fox Talbot. The Koh-i-Noor, the great diamond, which we had acquired, I think it was a slightly sort of extorted gift out of an Indian prince, as far as I recall. Rather less contentiously, the great glass fountain at the centre, made by another

firm of glassmakers called Thomas Osler. There was Baron Maricchetti's plaster model for the statue of Richard the Lionheart, which eventually got made in bronze and put outside the House of Lords. Oh, the one that's still there today. Yeah, that's right. There was a stuffed elephant carrying a howdah in the Indian section. Then there were slightly more ridiculous things, like an umbrella which was also a gun, and there were lots of tableaus of stuffed animals,

tableaus of stuffed kittens having tea, that kind of thing. animals, tableaus of stuffed kittens having tea, that kind of thing. And then there were those sort of crazily over-ornamented sideboards and cupboards and mirrors and things, which were among the perhaps unfortunate aspects of taste around that time. So it's a mixture of businesses really showing off at quite a big, at large scale, and then consumer stuff that you could buy, little home furnishings, knickknacks for your home. Absolutely. There was something called the Medieval Court,

because this was the height of the Gothic revival, and the Medieval Court was put on by A.W. Ampugin, the great designer who was designing the interior of the Palace of Westminster. And the medieval court was all of the wonderful recreated medieval-style items you could buy for your home or your church. So if you thought what your house really needed was a gothic chandelier or gothic dining table and chairs, you just mosey on around to the medieval court and place an order with the relevant manufacturer.

You've got tens of thousands of people going, where do they go to the toilet? You've totally caught me out. I am, so to speak, caught short. Let us hope that provision was on a suitably large scale the average average daily attendance was 42 000 uh so that's uh that's a lot of toilets isn't it and on the peak day 100 000 people came and over i think it was five months six million people came which is about a third of britain's population at the time so it's the largest mass event in history to date and it was all possible because of the railways and it was both the largest mass event in history to date. And it was all possible because of the railways. And it was both the largest mass event in history, but it was also the trailblazer. It

was the forerunner of the world that we recognise today, where we travel around, we go to gigs and exhibitions and festivals and conferences. And this is how modern humans live, but it all begins here. It's fascinating. Yeah, because railways had really just come into existence and there was a national railway network. And so the idea that people could travel and travel regularly quite long distances for pleasure or to go and see something hardly existed as an idea except for the very rich. tourism was really invented for the great exhibition uh and thomas cook the entrepreneur founded his business um running excursions to see the exhibition so in a very little little way you could say the the mass travel business was was founded on the basis of it were all the organizers happy with how it went was there any concern with it with a sort of french manufacturers the german manufacturers looking a bit tasty or or did with things roughly as they'd been intended to be showing off the greatness of Britain? I think the event was judged to be such a huge success

that I don't think they worried particularly much over much about the quality of foreign manufacturers. We know in the long term they probably should have been and in the long term within about 30 years both Germany and the United States had overtaken Britain in the primary measures of iron and steel production and things like that. But at the time, it was just far too great a success and triumphed in a way against the odds for people to feel very worried about that. And it inaugurated a decade of strong economic growth and really of great optimism across Britain and Europe.

And in France, these were the early years of the Second Empire. It was a great decade for France too. So it was a big success. It did, and it even made money. It made a profit of £186,000, which might sound today like, you know, wouldn't buy you a flat in an outer London borough. But at the time, that left a whole range of legacies. And a new commission was set up, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which still exists. And it bought the

Gore House estate, which was a big piece of land in kensington and part of it was used for property development uh to build uh very posh houses on prince's gate and queen's gate and they were meant to generate income and it provided seat sites for cultural institutions which include the albert hall and the new royal college of art and imperial college and the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum and the V&A are all on site bought by it so they all benefited and the site became known as Albertopolis. So Albertopolis which people can go and visit today and be very familiar with today world-class universities world-class museums and cultural venues that was all paid for out of the profit of the Great Exhibition. Yeah, the site. And the commission still exists, and it's been awarding scholarships and fellowships

for research in the sciences and engineering still today. Young scientists and engineers are still getting scholarships from the profits made by the 1851 exhibition. That is remarkable. And I suppose that's why, at Albertopolis, that's why when he died, he had this enormous memorial overlooked this this new little mini city he'd managed to make happen the prince died 10 years later in 1861 and it is rather shocking to think you know he was about only about 42 when he died uh so the prince you

know was not an old man he was in his early 30s when he did all this and in the mood of national mourning prince had been associated with this great national triumph and two memorials were built because they were victorians after all and the albert memorial is actually on the site of the the exhibition of the the crystal palace in hyde park so that's the easier place to tell where it is and there's a marvelous set of gates called the cobrookdale gates which are just a bit up the way from the Albert Memorial and they were made by the Colebrookdale company and they were one of their exhibits at the exhibition but characteristically for the Victorians they wanted

a memorial to the exhibition itself so there was already a memorial to the exhibition of 1851 which is the one to the south of the albert hall and that is also a statue of the prince holding a copy of the catalogue so it looks if it's a memorial to him but it's actually a memorial to the exhibition and also characteristically the victorians they found good use for the the building itself they didn't just junk the whole thing yeah so what's the use of having um prefabricated buildings um if you can't dismantle them and put them somewhere else so fox henderson and company who built it in the first place uh they bought it back and they dismantled it um and the company

had been founded which involved um paxton and several other people involved in the exhibition and they bought a big plot of land in Sydenham in South London, our hill, and the Crystal Palace was rebuilt there and a great park was created around it and it became a huge visitor attraction. So the name Crystal Palace in South London comes from the fact that the Crystal Palace was rebuilt there. It was smaller, but architecturally it was more elaborate. It had arched transepts, arched cross buildings at three points. And so it was quite a lot smaller, but it looked more elaborate. And it was like a theme park. It was a setting for mass concerts and events, and it had fixed displays in it some of which were like artistic representations of historic cultures so there was one area which was like an egyptian temple and

there's one which like an assyrian temple and there was one which was like a recreation of the alhambra in granada but then there were other areas which were like big concert venues and it was set in this great park and at the far end of the park there was a lake which was equipped with plastered dinosaurs which you can still see there and they remain and they remain because the rest of the building tragically doesn't yes yeah the the crystal palace in crystal palace in in south london was destroyed by fire in 1937 and to many it seemed to symbolize the end of victorian brit Britain so what's still there are the railway stations and the terraces a lot of the statues and the rather fabulous model dinosaurs

are there and Crystal Palace gave its name to a whole suburb so there were lots of legacies of it there was the new commission all the scholarships they paid for, the establishment of Albertopolis, site for all those museums. The palace itself had an afterlife. But above all, it gave birth to a certain idea of the world being potentially a global marketplace and of progress through peace and free trade. Wow. That is an extraordinary legacy for an event that must have just felt so revolutionary and exciting to live through. Thank you very much, Stephen Brindle, for coming back on the podcast and talking me through it dan it's a great pleasure thank you very much for having me

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