The Crystal Palace (lost)

In 1850 the Building Committee for the Great Exhibition, chaired by William Cubitt and including Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and Charles Barry, received some 245 entries and rejected every one. Joseph Paxton, head gardener at Chatsworth, met Henry Cole on 9 June and two days later, during a Midland Railway board meeting, drew his first concept for a vast iron-and-glass hall on a sheet of pink blotting paper. Built by Fox, Henderson and Co., whose director Charles Fox was later knighted, the palace was ready to receive exhibits in five months. Queen Victoria opened it on 1 May 1851, and by the close on 15 October more than six million admissions had been counted.

Paxton's company bought the structure for £70,000 and re-erected it, enlarged and redesigned, between 1852 and 1854 at Penge Place on Sydenham Hill; the Queen opened it again on 10 June 1854 before 40,000 guests. The move cost £1.3 million, a debt that was never repaid. The north transept burned down in December 1866. After bankruptcy in 1911, the Earl of Plymouth bought the site for £230,000 to save it from developers; the palace became a naval training establishment in the First World War and then housed the first Imperial War Museum. On the evening of 30 November 1936 a fire that began after an explosion in the women's cloakroom destroyed it within hours, despite 89 fire engines and over 400 firemen; the glow was seen across eight counties.

The idea came from Chatsworth: Paxton cited the huge ribbed leaves of the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, whose glasshouse already used a flat version of ridge-and-furrow glazing. In Hyde Park the length of a single pane, 49 inches, formed the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle that set the pitch of small gables 8 feet wide, and these defined a basic module of 24 by 24 feet. Every bay was identical and fully prefabricated, and some sections stood within eighteen hours of leaving the factory. Rain ran into U-shaped timber channels, the Paxton gutters, which also served as rails for the glaziers' trolleys; a team of 80 men could fix more than 18,000 panes a week. More than 1,000 iron columns carried 2,224 trellis girders, some 4,000 tons of iron, beneath 293,000 panes measuring 25 by 120 cm, supplied by Chance Brothers. Shortly before building began, Paxton added a tall barrel-vaulted transept so that mature elms could be kept. Owen Jones devised the interior colour scheme.

At Sydenham the nave was given a barrel vault as well, the central transept was enlarged and raised, and two further transepts were added at the ends, giving a length of 490 m and a width of 117 m across the transepts.

In 1851 the palace held the displays of the Great Exhibition; beneath the transept, full-grown elms left standing in the park surrounded the Crystal Fountain, 27 feet or about 8 m tall.

At Sydenham the building became a museum for a mass public. Courts designed by Matthew Digby Wyatt among others illustrated Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Pompeian, Alhambra and Renaissance art, and Pugin's Mediaeval Court from the 1851 exhibition was rebuilt inside. Plants were central to the display. An 1865 guide mentions a fine collection of tropical plants and ferns in the north transept, which formed a large palm house until the fire of 1866, and an 1882 guide notes that every plant carried a name label and that the water plants were thriving. The artist Charles Ricketts remembered the scent of the beds of tropical vegetation where the parrots were kept. Outside, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins completed thirty-three life-size models of dinosaurs and other extinct animals in 1854.

The palace is gone, but its site is now Crystal Palace Park, listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens and owned since 2023 by the Crystal Palace Park Trust. The Italian terraces, their sculpture and the sphinxes flanking the steps still trace the footprint of the building, whose concrete footings remain just below the surface. Hawkins' dinosaurs stand in and around the lake in the south-east of the park. Beneath Crystal Palace Parade, the subway of the former High Level station, roofed with Italian mosaic, is listed Grade II*. The Crystal Palace Museum on Anerley Hill, close to the base of the south tower that was protected in 2020, tells the building's story; half a day is enough to combine terraces, dinosaurs and museum.