Joseph Paxton

Joseph Paxton was born on 3 August 1803 in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire, into a farming family. At fifteen he became a garden boy at Battlesden Park, near Woburn; after several posts he joined the Horticultural Society's Chiswick gardens, leased from the Duke of Devonshire, in 1823. The duke noticed him and appointed him head gardener at Chatsworth, the family's great house in Derbyshire, in 1826; the following year he married Sarah Bown, the housekeeper's niece, who assisted him in his work. Working for the 6th Duke, he turned Chatsworth into a testing ground: the arboretum begun in 1835, the rock garden started in 1842, the Emperor Fountain, built for a possible visit by the Tsar in 1844 that never took place and whose jet is recorded at 90 m, and the remodelling of Edensor village. Under glass, his Great Conservatory, completed in 1840, measured 84 m long, 37 m wide and 19 m high, making it the largest glass building in England at the time. It was demolished in 1920, and only its supporting walls survive. The Conservative Wall (“The Case”), 91 m long, which Paxton designed in 1838, was covered in 1848 with a timber-and-glass frame. At Lismore Castle in Ireland, the timber vinery of 1853 uses his ridge-and-furrow roof, designed to let in as much light as possible.

In 1849 he brought the Victoria regia, the giant water lily, into flower at Chatsworth and built a house for it whose design was based on the plant's leaves. In 1850, when all 245 designs submitted to house the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park had been rejected, Paxton sketched his own on blotting paper on 11 June, during a meeting in Derby; his scheme, prepared in nine days, was accepted. It was a much enlarged version of his lily house: a modular, prefabricated, extensively glazed building more than 500 m long, put up in eight months by 2,000 men, with Fox, Henderson, a firm specialising in structural ironwork. The Exhibition opened in May 1851 and was a great success; Paxton was knighted in October. The Crystal Palace was then rebuilt at Sydenham, larger and with two transepts added; Queen Victoria opened it again on 10 June 1854, amid gardens laid out by Paxton with pools and water jets. It stood there until the fire of 1936.

Paxton also ranks among the creators of Britain's public parks. Birkenhead Park, for which Paxton drew up the plan in 1844 following the 1843 Act, and which opened in 1847, is described as the United Kingdom's first public park to be paid for from public funds; Edward Kemp, who had worked with Paxton at Chatsworth, supervised its construction. The American Frederick Law Olmsted visited it in 1850 and later carried many of its features into New York's Central Park. He designed other urban parks, among them People's Park in Halifax, with Edward Milner (opened 1857), and contributed to Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow; in 1845 Coventry commissioned him to design a new public cemetery, London Road Cemetery.

He was also a writer: he edited the Magazine of Botany (1834-1848) and co-founded the Gardeners' Chronicle in 1841. Elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry in December 1854, he sat until his death. He designed Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire for Baron Mayer de Rothschild and, again for the Rothschilds, the château de Ferrières near Paris; railway speculation made him wealthy. He died on 8 June 1865 at Rockhills, his house in Sydenham.