Crystal Palace

VISITING Hyde Park to look for traces of the Crystal Palace is a fruitless exercise. For a few months in 1851, as the purpose-built venue for the Great Exhibition, the 100ft-high, 1,848ft-long and 408ft-wide structure stood in the area between the Prince of Wales Gate on Kensington Road and Rotten Row.

- Sir Joseph Paxton

VISITING Hyde Park to look for traces of the Crystal Palace is a fruitless exercise. For a few months in 1851, as the purpose-built venue for the Great Exhibition, the 100ft-high, 1,848ft-long and 408ft-wide structure stood in the area between the Prince of Wales Gate on Kensington Road and Rotten Row. The flat, grassy expanse is now occupied by football pitches. The ornate cast-iron Coalbrookdale Gate, at the bottom of the West Carriage Drive, was the entry point, although the gate no longer occupies its original position.

The idea of an international show displaying artistic and manufactured items from around the world was the brainchild of Henry Cole, then assistant keeper of the Public Record Office and subsequently first director of the V&A Museum. Prince Albert enthusiastically championed Cole’s proposal as an opportunity for Britain to present itself as a leading industrial economy and it was felt that such an undertaking should be staged in a new, suitably vast arena.

A competition was held in 1850 encouraging engineers and architects to submit designs. Not without dispute, the successful entry was eventually deemed to be that of Joseph Paxton who, as the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, had designed its Great Stove (or Conservatory), the world’s largest glasshouse on completion in 1840. A scheme by Richard Turner who, in association with Decimus Burton, had built the Palm House at Kew Gardens, was considered too costly at an estimated £300,000. Most other entries proposed brick structures.