Crystal Palace, Hyde Park

A building made of light

Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace was the largest enclosed glass structure ever built when it opened on 1 May 1851 in Hyde Park, London.

The building covered 7.7 hectares — bigger than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It rose 33 metres at its highest point and contained 84 000 square metres of glass on a 4 000-tonne wrought- iron skeleton. The entire structure was prefabricated from standardised modules of cast-iron columns and wrought-iron trusses, assembled on site in nine months.

The building system — what we would now call modular construction — was Paxton's invention.

Paxton was a gardener

Joseph Paxton was not an architect. Not an engineer. He had no formal training in any building discipline.

He was the head gardener of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House. He had designed the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth in the 1830s — a heated glasshouse that anticipated many of the structural principles he later used at the Crystal Palace.

When the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition was bogged down rejecting design proposals in 1850 — 245 submissions received, all rejected — Paxton sketched his prefabricated glasshouse design on the back of a blotter during a railway journey, submitted it, and was accepted within two weeks.

Six million visits

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations ran from 1 May to 15 October 1851. It received 6 039 195 paid visits — about a third of the entire British population at that date.

The exhibition contained 13 000 exhibits from 25 countries. Working steam locomotives. Agricultural threshing machines. Hydraulic presses. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, newly acquired by Britain from the Punjab. Krupp's cast-steel field gun. Sewing machines. Daguerreotype cameras. An early prototype fax machine. The world's first photographic camera collection.

Admission cost one shilling on most days — a day's pay for a labourer — and was deliberately set to allow working-class attendance.

Why it isn't in Hyde Park anymore

The Crystal Palace was a temporary building. Its Hyde Park lease expired in 1852.

Paxton arranged for the entire structure to be disassembled and reassembled on a new site at Sydenham Hill in south London, where it reopened in 1854 and operated as a public attraction for 82 years.

On the evening of 30 November 1936, a small fire that began in a women's lavatory spread through the building's wooden flooring. Within hours the glass shell had collapsed. The next morning the structure was gone.

Winston Churchill, watching the fire from a distance, called it "the end of an age".