Country

Greenhouses to visit in the United Kingdom

The Verrière atlas lists 9 greenhouses in the United Kingdom, built between 1839 and 2002.

The country that invented the modern greenhouse. Kew's Palm House (1844–1848) set the iron-and-glass vocabulary later copied worldwide, and the neighbouring Temperate House is still the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse. Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool keep their own glass palaces, while the turn of the millennium brought the Eden Project in Cornwall and the Great Glasshouse in Wales.

9Greenhouses
1839Oldest — Palm House
2002Newest — Sheffield Winter Garden
8Cities
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All 9 greenhouses, oldest to newest

Palm House, Botanic Gardens, Belfast
1839–1852

Palm House

🇬🇧 Botanic Gardens, Belfast
One of the oldest surviving examples of a curvilinear cast-iron glasshouse, whitewashed every summer to protect the plants.
United KingdomView entry →
Palm House, Kew, London
1844–1848

Palm House

🇬🇧 Kew, London
The technical cradle of every great glasshouse that followed.
United KingdomView entry →
Temperate House, Kew, London
1860–1899

Temperate House

🇬🇧 Kew, London
The largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world.
United KingdomView entry →
Kibble Palace, Glasgow
1873

Kibble Palace

🇬🇧 Glasgow
A travelling Victorian glasshouse: built on the shores of Loch Long, it was dismantled and shipped by barge to Glasgow's botanic gardens.
United KingdomView entry →
Sefton Park Palm House, Sefton Park, Liverpool
1896

Sefton Park Palm House

🇬🇧 Sefton Park, Liverpool
Funded by a local benefactor, this Victorian glasshouse lost all its glass in 1941, but its frame held.
United KingdomView entry →
Chatsworth Display Greenhouse, Bakewell (Derbyshire)
1970

Chatsworth Display Greenhouse

🇬🇧 Bakewell (Derbyshire)
It holds direct descendants of the bananas and giant water lily that Joseph Paxton grew here in the nineteenth century.
United KingdomView entry →
Great Glasshouse, National Botanic Garden of Wales, Llanarthne
2000

Great Glasshouse

🇬🇧 National Botanic Garden of Wales, Llanarthne
Set on the Welsh hillside like a giant raindrop, this dome brings together six Mediterranean-climate regions of the world.
United KingdomView entry →
Eden Project, Bodelva, Cornwall
2001

Eden Project

🇬🇧 Bodelva, Cornwall
A dead clay pit reborn as a rainforest under bubbles.
United KingdomView entry →
Sheffield Winter Garden, Sheffield
2002

Sheffield Winter Garden

🇬🇧 Sheffield
One of the largest temperate glasshouses built in the UK in a century, framed entirely in glue-laminated larch.
United KingdomView entry →