Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Crystal Palace About this episode The Great Exhibition of 1851 was something to behold for the 6 million Victorian patrons who travelled to London's Hyde Park to see it. It was a triumphant showcase of the most extraordinary achievements of the Victorian age from industry, culture and engineering - gathered from all four corners of the globe. As visitors walked the 8 miles of exhibitions, they would have seen everything from the sublime to the absurd: the world’s largest diamond, a contraption to predict the weather using leeches, the world's first public flushing toilets and a two-person piano.
The enormous glass and iron building that housed the exhibition was big enough to house four St Pauls Cathedrals and its construction involved some of the most famous engineers of the Victorian age - Brunel, Faraday, Stephenson and Paxton.
To tell Dan the story of the Crystal Palace is historian and conservationist Steven Brindle.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Tim Arstall.
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1:55 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was the biggest international exhibition to that point in history. Housed in a building of unimaginable size, in the very heart of the world's biggest city, the capital of Earth's most dynamic economy. One in the throes of a revolution in how things were made and powered and moved. It was the great exhibition of 1851. An unambiguous celebration of industry and science and engineering and progress.
2:35 Dan Snow? A party thrown by a society who almost couldn't believe what they were experiencing. It was put on by a committee of geniuses, both political and scientific, and at its heart was a structure unlike any other ever seen before on this planet, made possible only by very recent revolutionary changes in methods of producing glass and iron. They built the largest man-made enclosed space in the world, one larger than any other that ever existed. It was 18 acres, that's around 10 soccer pitches, football pitches. There were over 3,000 columns, there were over 2,000 girders holding the whole thing
3:20 Dan Snow? together. And the extraordinary thing? It was all built in five months, well within the exhibition's budget. It was designed to house the wonders of the industrial world from Britain, its empire, and other nations, and it was designed to show them off to visitors, not just from Britain but around the world. It was envisaged that those visitors would take advantage of new steamships. They would travel across the oceans in unprecedented safety and speed. They would then be whisked to London on the railways, the iron road. This was truly a new world. And those visitors, boy did they come, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them.
4:04 Dan Snow? The poet Tennyson, the author Charles Darwin, the historian and political scientist Karl Marx.
4:10 Dan Snow? The author, Charlotte Bronte, exiled French royals, anyone who was anyone, I think, certainly in Western Europe. Duke of Wellington was there. Duke of Wellington, imagine that, he was in his eighties, born before the birth of the United States of America, the victor of Waterloo, a trespasser from a world of wood and stone in a palace of iron and glass. What they saw amazed them, not least, by the way, the facilities. They all had the option of using the first public flushing toilets in Britain, known as monkey closets. We should bring back that phrase. It was a spectacular success. It was an encapsulation
4:52 Dan Snow? of Britain, possibly the exact point when its lead over the rest of the world in industrial terms, engineering terms, was at its most stark. Here it is all about the great exhibition. Here's the historian Stephen Brindle, great to have him back on the podcast. He's going to tell me about the exhibition. He's going to tell me about its genesis, its execution, but also its legacy, how it endures, both in a very general sense, but also in some very particular ways, too. Here it is, folks, the great exhibition. Enjoy.
5:20 Speaker 04 T minus ten. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
5:24 Speaker 05 God save the king.
5:25 Speaker 06 No black-white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.
5:32 Speaker 04 And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
5:40 Dan Snow? Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast.
5:41 Speaker 06 Dan, thank you very much.
5:43 Dan Snow? Everywhere you go at the moment, every time I land in any city anywhere around the world, there's an expo or a this and a that and a this and a that. Now, is that a new phenomenon? In 1851, was that something people were familiar with?
5:54 Speaker 06 No, not at all, Dan. Britain was the first industrial society and we were producing mass-produced manufactured goods at scale, but imported goods were relatively rare and were restricted to certain categories, you know, rugs from the East, porcelain from France. And there were, and there were issues about getting British goods exported overseas and about people wanting... To see the range of foreign sort of manufacturers there might be. And there were concerns about the quality of British design. How good is it really? And so people were starting to think about industrial design and export. But there were no big exhibitions at that stage and the idea had to be invented.
6:37 Dan Snow? So what was the genesis? It was trade, was it? Because I mean, you hear about Prince Albert being involved. It's a royal do. It all seems a bit grubby, just trying to flog a few bits of old iron. I mean, it feels quite modern that.
6:49 Speaker 06 The Society of Arts got involved, but they held modest exhibitions of manufactured goods because they wanted to help British manufacturers. Give them somewhere to show off their goods in London, but they were really quite small. And their secretary was a man called Henry Cole, keeper of the public records. One of those extraordinary workaholic Victorians. He was the inventor of the Christmas card, amongst many other things. And he came up with the idea of having a really big exhibition. Part of the problem here was that the French had similar manufacturer exhibitions in Paris and theirs were better. So Cole thought, well, we should do something about this. We need to scale up. And he got the Prince Consort involved. Prince Albert, serious minded, intelligent, looking for a role.
7:34 Speaker 06 Queen Victoria wouldn't let him in on the meetings with the Prime Minister, as we know. And so Prince Albert and Cole formed an unlikely but very powerful alliance. And the Prince's support, above all, guaranteed that doors would open for Cole with this crazy idea for a really big exhibition of manufacturers. And without him, something like this would probably have been kicked in for long grass by the government.
7:56 Dan Snow? I never cease to be amazed by the fact that when you're digging around in some strange bit of British life, you quite rapidly you discover the root cause of it all, which is the Anglo French competition. It's fascinating, isn't it? So it's an exhibition, you're showing off British goods. That's great. It's an age of industry. Everyone's wowed at these new gizmos and devices and widgets. Who's the audience? Is it a British internal audience? Are you hoping to attract foreigners?
8:22 Speaker 06 We are hoping for a world audience, Dan. A bit more background here. On the one hand, Britain has just built 5,000 miles of railway. The railway mania has happened. And so there is internal transport of a kind which has only existed very recently. And the idea that millions of people might come to an event in London. More than a few thousands has suddenly become a reality. And there are now steam packets going to France. So so overseas visitors can come too. So that's one thing. Another thing is that harvests have improved and the decade called the Hungary 40s are over. And Europe is feeling prosperous again.
9:04 Speaker 06 And another is that an era of great political instability from 1846, the year of revolutions, 1848. And so there's a sense that Britain and Europe feel that they've moved past a whole series of great crises. And there's and a feeling of optimism and economies in Britain and throughout Europe are growing again. And I think that's quite an important part of the background because this couldn't have happened in the late 1840s because they were convulsed with political crisis. And Britain is able to welcome foreign visitors on a scale that could never been visited for because of the railways. And it is looking to increase its export markets.
9:45 Speaker 06 And so it is definitely looking for overseas people to come and see what we can do. Yes, all of that.
9:51 Dan Snow? Wow, so they're going to get steam ships over from the continent. They're going to get whizzed up from Dover to London on this train. It's just, it's just a, it's a new world. We think we've been lived through technological change. I mean, the people organising this were born in an era of horse and carriage and sail powered ships.
10:07 Speaker 06 Well, indeed. And the Prince Consort's interest, I think, was really what generated the step change. And meant the government had to take it seriously. And so when a royal commission was established in January 1850, it included the Prince, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell and Lord Darby. That is past president, future prime ministers were all on the Royal Commission. And there was an executive committee which included Henry Cole and Sir William Cubitt, who was probably London's biggest builder developer. And Robert Stevenson, who was the greatest engineer of the age. So because of the Prince, it had very good representation. But where was it going to be? It had to be in London. They needed a really big building. And so the almost the only site for it was Hyde Park.
10:52 Dan Snow? Straight away, they're thinking, this is going to be, we're going to do a big scale. Why can't they just have it in sort of Burlington Arcade or something? This is from the beginning going to be massive, is it?
11:00 Speaker 06 Because from the beginning, they were thinking really, really big. And this is an aspect I don't quite understand. And how do you work out how big an exhibition of the manufactures of all nations is going to be? But what they ended up with was a building that covered 18 acres. So they must have got there quite quickly, between the beginning of 1850 and the summer, by which time they'd have had expressions of interest, you know, via British consulates around Europe and actually around the world. They would have had an idea of how many square feet of exhibition space everyone wanted. And so half of this was going to be Britain and the British Empire, and half was going to be the rest of the world. And the answer that they ended up with apparently was 18 acres of enclosed space.
11:44 Speaker 06 So it would merely involve the largest enclosed structure ever built in history.
11:49 Dan Snow? That is swaggering confidence as well. It's like invite the rest of the world. So you're not, you're not just trying to show off British manufacturing. You're like, hey, listen, you've got good stuff, bring it along. We're at the absolute zenith of Britain's industrial lead at this point, aren't we? And the Corn Laws have been repealed. There's a confidence around free trade. Anything anyone can make, we can compete with them.
12:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. That is how they felt. And a measure of their confidence is that although they realised they're going to need this gigantic building, they wouldn't really know at first how they were going to build the gigantic building or what it would cost, or whether they could do it within their budget, which was about £100,000. Mind you, £100,000 went a lot further in those days.
12:27 Dan Snow? They had a great British institution, they had a competition.
12:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, they had a competition. There were 250 entries, but none of them seemed to be buildable for anything like £100,000. And most of them looked pretty permanent, really, like massive, great new building in Hyde Park.
12:45 Dan Snow? Made of iron and brick. I mean, it's a proper, proper building.
12:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, a proper building because they thought to be that big, it would have to be. And so their own building committee, which included Robert Stephenson and Isobar Kingdom Brunel and William Cubit, produced their own design, which still had a massive outer shell and a great big iron and glass dome, which seems to have been Brunel's contribution. It would have taken over 10 million bricks. And it was vehemently criticised and it was still rather unclear whether you could build a structure. Involving 10 million bricks in under a year, which is what they had by then. So by the summer, the whole idea was looking like it might fold because they couldn't build a big enough structure in time and to their budget.
13:30 Dan Snow? Just to dwell on one point here, the idea of having Cubitt, Stephenson and Brunel on the committee together, I mean, three of the greatest engineers in world history is just extraordinary. And I love, I love the idea of the three prime ministers taking the political heat for as well. I mean, this is a, this is a serious, I guess this is why the job got done because this was a very, very serious, you know, application and, and team behind it.
13:54 Speaker 06 They had really set themselves up potentially for one massive failure was the thing.
13:59 Dan Snow? I guess at this point.
14:00 Speaker 06 Once you've announced this thing, you can't have this thing flop or go pear shaped.
14:05 Dan Snow? You've announced the date, have you as well?
14:07 Speaker 06 I think they'd announced May 1851 for the opening by then.
14:10 Dan Snow? Right. So you've got a problem. You've got to get a building. And for people not listening to this in the UK, the weather in May, it can be very nice, but it's, it's, you wouldn't want to have an outdoor festival with lots of delicate bits of engineering and technology necessarily under the, under the blue skies of London in May.
14:25 Speaker 06 So at any rate, by the summer of the year before 1850, there was no realistic affordable design. Even Brunel, Stephenson and Sir William Cubitt had not been able to produce one. And the idea was in jeopardy. And so it was saved by another of those extraordinary Victorians, who's a man called Joseph Paxton. He was self-educated and he began his career as a gardener's boy, but he was a gardener's boy at Chatsworth, the great home of the Duke of Devonshire. And he rose to be the head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire. And he was a self-taught engineer and architect. He was self-taught everything Paxton, really. And he designed glass houses for the Duke who liked to grow rare species. There was
15:07 Speaker 06 a lily house and then there was a really huge one called the Great Stove. And Paxton, who remember this completely self-educated man, worked with Midlands manufacturers to devise a new system of glazing which could be manufactured at scale for these huge greenhouse. He was building at Chatsworth, which had been some time before, I mean, the great story was about eighteen thirty six to forty. So Paxton became the Duke of Devonshire's right hand man. He was such a brilliant, hardworking, sixteen hour day Victorian kind of guy. And he represented the Duke's interest on the board of the Midland Railway. And because he read the papers and he'd heard about the troubles the eighteen fifty one
15:49 Speaker 06 exhibition was having, and he was at a boring board meeting of the Midland Railway, and he did a doodle on his blotting pad. And so Paxton had an idea that what he needed was the world's biggest greenhouse. And he went to London, and he got someone to induce him to Henry Cole, and he paced the site, and he went back to North Wales, where he attended the floating of one of the trusses for Robert Stephenson's Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait. And then he went back to Chatsworth, and he spent nine days with his staff there making designs. And on the twentieth of June, he set out for London with his design. And Paxton met Robert Stephenson by chance at Derby Station. They'd both attended
16:31 Speaker 06 the floating of the trusses for Stephenson's Bridge. And Paxton shows some designs and said, just sort of just knock this together, thought you might be interested. And Stephenson took him see Cole, and they said, this is a thousand times better than anything which has been brought before us. And so a month later, on the twenty sixth of July, the design was adopted by the commission.
16:52 Dan Snow? That's a streamlined commissioning process.
16:54 Speaker 06 A streamlined commission process is is just the way to put it. Yeah. The design was published in the Illustrated London News and punched christened it the Crystal Palace and the name stuck.
17:06 Dan Snow? This is untested technology on the most enormous scale at the heart of the Imperial Capital, having invited the rest of the world to come and check it out. I mean, this could not be more risky.
17:16 Speaker 06 It was certainly kind of risky. It in a way wasn't as risky as all that, because there were it was built on very solid, technical, technological foundations, which Paxton understood as well as anyone, because of his specific experience. And there were two companies in the picture without whom it wouldn't have been possible. And one was a firm of glassmakers called Chance Bubbers, who were based at Smithy, and they'd invented a new means of making cylinder glass at scale. Now, as you and your listeners probably know, historically, the way in which you made sheets of glass was to to blow sheets on the end of a long tube. And you'd hope to blow quite a big sheet, you might be able to cut some little panes off it.
18:02 Speaker 06 But the other newer method was to make a cylinder of glass. Please don't ask me to explain how they do that. And you cut the cylinder on one side and while the glass is still in a ductile state, you flatten it out. And Chance Brothers invented a new means of doing this at much larger scale. And they could make panes which are up to about two feet wide, I think, but in quite long strips. So that's how the Duke of Devonshire had been able to glaze his enormous green palace at Chatsworth. And the other company were iron founders and they were called Fox Henderson and Company. And they're really one of the most remarkable companies in all history.
18:43 Speaker 06 Because they had a works also, as it happened at Smethwick in the East Midlands, where about 2,000 of their workforce made iron castings and forgings. And in particular, what they made was prefabricated buildings.
18:57 Dan Snow? And those buildings, just to interrupt there, what those buildings, what they would be, structures to erect in gardens or used for the military or industrial?
19:06 Speaker 06 These were mainly more industrial things because the railways generated a large need for quite wide span roofs, good sheds, engine sheds, locomotive repair sheds, carriage sheds, needed to rebuild to to roof really large buildings quite quickly. And so what Fox Henderson did was they made prefabricated roof trusses and roof frames and sometimes frames whole buildings. And the other thing they'd learned how to do was to build wide span roof, that is about 100 feet wide, to span the slipways in Royal Naval Dockyards. Because if you could build a ship or repair a ship undercover, so it wasn't getting rained on the whole time, the whole thing went much better.
19:50 Speaker 06 And Fox Henderson were one of two companies that knew how to make wide span prefabricated roofs. In naval yards and there were a couple of places where they remain. I think there's one in Pembroke and there's one of their, one or two of theirs in what was the naval Yard at Deptford, the place now called Convoy's Wharf. And so they had a really unparalleled expertise in large scale prefabricated iron construction. And the only reason that Paxton could say, I can deliver this is because he knew Fox Henderson and Company and Chance Brothers very well indeed.
20:26 Dan Snow? So there's just a coming together, not, not only, I mean, at every point of this story, there's a coalescing, there's a coming together of, of different technologies that's just make this possible at, at exactly this moment in time.
20:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, absolutely. What Paxton had devised with his staff at Chatsworth in nine days was designed for a vast glass house, three storeys high. And he could do this because these two companies, he knew they could make it, but it still had to be a new design. It was based on a module, which was based on the biggest pane of glass that he knew Chance Brothers could make. And there'd be a modular system for making the glazing in a system which was known as Paxton roofing, which is like a ridge and furrow system. So the roof goes slightly up and down, framed in wood. It had to do that so it would drain
21:17 Speaker 06 the weather efficiently. And the iron frame, there's a limited number of standardized parts which could be made one, two or three storeys high and reproduced almost indefinitely. But it sort of started with the widest pane of glass that Chance Brothers could make and, and the modules sort of started with that. And the design was really as much about the techniques used and how it could be made in parts, delivered by train and wagon and assembled on site. And there were further elements of the design which they, they developed as they went along, like the design for glazing, it involved cars running on temporary tracks along the roof of the building. And the design for drainage of the vast roof through the columns, that really had to be developed as they went along because eighteen acres
22:02 Speaker 06 is going to catch a lot of rain. And so the design is part It partly to do with the techniques by how it's made and it partly had to be improvised as they went along. But it was a miracle of organisation design. It was the largest enclosed space that had ever been built in the world with three thousand three hundred and thirty columns and two thousand two hundred and twenty four girders. And it was one thousand eight hundred and forty eight feet long and four hundred and fifty six wide. That's about five hundred and sixty three metres long. And it was built in five months flat by five thousand labourers. It was built in five months, the biggest enclosed space in history. I I it's hard to believe, isn't it?
22:46 Dan Snow? It is hard to believe and don't tell me it was on budget. I can't cope with that.
22:50 Speaker 06 It was built at a total cost of eighty nine thousand pounds and their budget for the building was a hundred thousand.
22:55 Dan Snow? So it was incredible speed. I came in well under the budget. Right, okay. And was it supposed to be temporary?
23:02 Speaker 06 Yes, yeah. And it was. It was dismantled afterwards and rebuilt.
23:06 Dan Snow? So the building was a huge success. Did it get a bit hot in there? I mean, when when everyone was packed in. So well, tell me about the exhibition itself.
23:14 Speaker 06 Well, there were problems and there were criticisms and there were opponents. People said the crowds of people would spread cholera and they said there would be riots and they said there'd be revolutions with so many people coming together. And the crowds would threaten public models and they said the heat of building would make people faint. And then there were rather more realistic criticisms. This is a very English one, which related to the trees in Hyde Park. And they were going to have to fell about six or seven large trees. And people weren't happy about that. So the building had to be given a big cross transept with an arched roof, which actually greatly improved its appearance in order to house a number of big trees.
23:58 Speaker 06 And so the building was built around these big trees. But there were birds nesting in the trees which were trapped inside the building. And they realised that they trapped several hundred birds inside the Crystal Palace at quite a late stage, which were going to poo all over the exhibits.
24:15 Dan Snow? Oh, right. And how do they get rid of those?
24:18 Speaker 06 Well, they couldn't use slingshots, of course, or shotguns and glass. Commissioner going out of their minds and Prince, Prince Albert tells Queen Victoria, as it might be, over the breakfast table. And she said, send for the Duke of Wellington, who was duly sent for. And the Queen explained the problem to him and he said simply, try Sparrow Hawks, Mum.
24:40 Dan Snow? That's brilliant. So, I mean, the Victor of Waterloo brings a bit of old, old school wisdom. It's not like he was suggesting.
24:47 Speaker 06 Old school common sense. No one had thought of that until the Duke of Wellington was called in.
24:52 Dan Snow? So the Duke of Wellington's last, his last great victory.
24:55 Speaker 06 Was, was over the London Sparrow, yeah, and saved the great exhibition.
25:00 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More on the Great Exhibition coming up after this.
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27:06 Speaker 02 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.
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27:20 Speaker 02 Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed and the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Addition terms apply for all offers. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the
27:58 Dan Snow? ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History Hit.
28:15 Dan Snow? So they've dealt with the birds and the bird poo problem. The other great British tradition is everyone saying something's going to be rubbish and then falling, swooning for it when it actually happens. Do you get that typical profile here?
28:25 Speaker 06 Yes, indeed, there is a rather wonderful passage in a letter by the Prince Consort in which he goes through all of the terrible things which people predicted would happen. And of course, it was a triumphant success and on the opening on the first of May in eighteen fifty-one was attended by twenty-four thousand people and massed choirs sang and Queen Victoria opened the exhibition and she wrote, "The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building with all its decorations and exhibits, all this was indeed moving and a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert and my dear country, which has shown itself so great today." And she came another twenty-two times. So Queen Victoria obviously really enjoyed it.
29:09 Dan Snow? So she wants to go and have a proper look around all the...
29:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to see, too.
29:14 Dan Snow? Well, do you tell me, how much was there to see? So you go in, is it just, well, it's like a, presumably at the time revolutionary, but now familiar, like a modern trade show or a modern exhibition, is this, what, the stalls?
29:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, there are lots of really fine contemporary views, water-coloured views. So if listeners just Google "great exhibition eighteen fifty-one" and go to images, you'll find lots of them. You're picturing an enormous, enormous glass roof building with one very long main nave, it's about thirty mile long, and it's three storeys high. So there are upper galleries on each side and this main nave runs whole length. And there's a big cross transept with an arch roof which goes higher, which has trees. And the simple and effective colour scheme whereby the columns, yellow and blue, and the girds are blue. And there were four basic categories: raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine
30:07 Speaker 06 art. And each class had a jewellery and the jewellery's awarded prizes. And there was huge catalogue of winners awarded at the end. And there was a separate machine hall with a boiler house so that they could display steam-powered machinery of all kinds running. And lots of people bought season tickets and went back again and again because there was so much to see. And countries like France and Germany and Russia and the United
30:35 Speaker 06 States and what were then territories of the British Empire, most notably India, took great sections of it and displayed exhibitions. And each of these would have been like a super crowded department store or trade fair. So there was really a huge amount to see.
30:52 Dan Snow? And tell me some of the highlights and what were people talking about? What were people surprised by?
30:58 Speaker 06 Oh, early photographs in particular, and they've already been invented. Some of the first photographs, early photographs in existence are of the exhibition taken by Fox Talbot. The Koh-i-noor, the great diamond, which Britain had acquired. I think it was a slightly sort of extorted gift out of an Indian prince, as far as I recall. Rather less contentiously, the great glass fountain at the centre, made by another firm of glassmakers called Thomas Osler. There was Baron Marichetti's plaster model for the statue of Richard the Lionheart, which eventually got made in bronze and put outside the House of Lords.
31:38 Dan Snow? Oh, the one that's still there today?
31:39 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's right. There was a stuffed elephant carrying a howdar in the Indian section. Then there were slightly more ridiculous things, like an umbrella, which is also gone. And there were lots of tableaus of stuffed animals, tableaus of stuffed kittens having tea, that kind of thing. And then there were the sort of crazily over ornamented sideboards and cupboards and mirrors and things, which were among the more perhaps unfortunate aspects of taste around that time.
32:16 Dan Snow? So it's a mixture of businesses really showing off quite big at large scale and then consumer stuff that you could buy, little home furniture, knickknacks for your home?
32:25 Speaker 06 Absolutely. There was something called the medieval court, because this was at the height of the Gothic revival. And the medieval court was put on by A.W. Empugin, the great designer, who is designing the interior of the Palace of Westminster. And the medieval court was all of the wonderful recreated medieval style items you could buy for your home or your church. So if you thought what your house really needed was a Gothic chandelier or Gothic dining table and chairs, you just move on around to the medieval court and place an order with the relevant manufacturer.
32:59 Dan Snow? You've got tens of thousands of people going, where do they go to the toilet?
33:06 Speaker 06 You've totally caught me out. I am, so to speak, caught short. Let us hope that provision was only a suitably large quality, suitably large scale, because the average daily attendance was 42,000. So that's a lot of toilets, isn't it? And on the peak day, 100,000 people came. And over, I think it was five months, 6 million people came, which is about a third of Britain's population at the time. So it's the largest mass event in history to date. And it was not possible because of railways.
33:39 Dan Snow? And it was both the largest mass event in history, but it was also the trailblazer. It was the forerunner of this, of the world that we recognise today, where we travel around, we go to gigs and exhibitions and festivals and conferences. And this is how modern humans live. But it all begins here. It's fascinating.
33:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, because railways had really just come into existence and there was National Railway Network. And so the idea that people could travel and travel regularly, quite long distances for pleasure, or to go and see something, hardly existed as an idea, except for the very rich. But this was, but mass tourism was really invented for the great exhibition. And Thomas Cook, the entrepreneur, founded his business, running excursions to see the exhibition. So in a very little, little way, you could say the mass travel business was founded on the base of it.
34:29 Dan Snow? Were all the organisers happy with how it went? Was there any concern with it with a sort of French manufacturers, the German manufacturers looking a bit tasty? Or were things roughly as they'd been intended to be showing off the greatness of Britain?
34:42 Speaker 06 I think it was, the event was judged to be such a huge success, that I don't think they worried particularly much, overmuch, about the quality of foreign manufacturers. We know in the long term, they probably should have been. And in the long term, within about 30 years, both Germany and the United States had overtaken Britain in the primary measures of iron and steel production and things like that. But at the time, it was just far too great a success and triumph in a way against. The odds for people feel very worried about that and it inaugurated a decade of strong economic growth and we have great optimism
35:22 Speaker 06 across Britain and Europe and in France, these were the early years of the Second Empire. It was a great decade for France too.
35:28 Dan Snow? So it was a big success.
35:30 Speaker 06 It did and it even made money. It made a profit of a hundred and eighty six thousand pounds, which might sound today like, you know, wouldn't buy you a flat in an outer London borough, but at the time that left a whole range of legacies. And a new commission was set up, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of eighteen fifty one, which is, which still exists. And it bought the Gore House Estate, which was a big piece of land in Kensington and part of it was used for property development to build very posh houses on Prince's Gate and Queen's Gate and they were meant to generate an income. And it provided seats sites for cultural institutions, which included the Albert Hall
36:12 Speaker 06 and the New Royal College of Art and Imperial College and the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum and the V and A all on site bought by it. So they all benefited and the site became known as Albertopolis.
36:26 Dan Snow? So Albertopolis, which people can go and visit today and be very familiar with today, world-class universities, world-class museums and cultural venues. That was all paid for out of the profit of the Great Exhibition.
36:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, the site and the commission still exists and it's been awarding scholarships and fellowships for research in the sciences and engineering still today. Young scientists and engineers are still getting scholarships from the profits made by the eighteen fifty one exhibition.
36:51 Dan Snow? That is remarkable and I suppose that's why Albertopolis, that's why when he died, he had this enormous memorial overlooked. This this new little mini city he'd managed to make happen.
37:02 Speaker 06 The Prince died ten years later in eighteen sixty one and it is rather shocking to think, you know, he was about only about forty two when he died. So the Prince, you know, was not an old man. He was in his early thirties when he did all this. And in the mood of national mourning, Prince had been associated with this great national triumph and two memorials were built because they were Victorians after all. And the Albert Memorial is actually on the site of the the exhibition of the the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. So that's the easier place to tell where it is. And there's a marvellous set of gates called the Colebrookdale Gates, which are just a bit up the way from the Albert Memorial. And they were made by the Colebrookdale Company and they were
37:44 Speaker 06 one of their exhibits at the exhibition. But characteristically for the Victorians, they they wanted a memorial to the exhibition itself. So there was already a memorial to the exhibition of eighteen fifty one, which is the one to the south of the Albert Hall. And that is also a statue of the Prince, holding a copy of the catalogue. So it looks as if it's a memorial to him, but it's actually a memorial to the exhibition.
38:09 Dan Snow? And also, characteristically, the Victorians, they found good use for the the building itself. They didn't just junk the whole thing.
38:15 Speaker 06 Yeah. So what's the use of having prefabricated buildings if you can't dismantle them and put them somewhere else? So Fox Henderson and Company, who'd built it in the first place, they bought it back and they dismantled it. And the company had been founded, which involved Paxton and several other people involved in the exhibition. And they bought a big plot of land in Sidonham in South London, our hill. And the Crystal Palace was rebuilt there, and a great park was created around it, and it became a huge visitor attraction. So the name Crystal Palace in South London comes from the fact that
38:55 Speaker 06 the Crystal Palace was rebuilt there. It was smaller, but architecturally it was more elaborate. It had arched transepts, arched cross buildings at three points.
39:07 Speaker 06 And so it was quite a lot smaller, but it looked more elaborate and it was like a theme park. It was a setting for mass concerts and events and it had fixed displays in it, some of which were like artistic representations of historic cultures. So there were one area which was like an Egyptian temple and there's one which like an Assyrian temple and there was one which was like a recreation of the Alhambrian Grenada. But then there were other areas which were like big concert venues and it was set in this great park. And at the far end of the park, there was a lake which was equipped with plastered dinosaurs, which you can still see there.
39:43 Dan Snow? And they remain.
39:44 Speaker 06 And they remain.
39:45 Dan Snow? Because the rest of the building tragically doesn't.
39:47 Speaker 06 Yes, yeah, the, the Crystal Palace i- in Crystal Palace in, in South London was destroyed by fire in 1937 and to many it seemed to symbolise the end of Victorian Britain. So what's still there are the railway stations and the terraces, a lot of the statues and rather fabulous model dinosaurs there. And Crystal Palace gave its name to a whole suburb. So there were lots of legacies of it. There was the New Commission, all the scholarships they paid for, the establishment of Albertopolis, site for all those museums. The palace itself had an afterlife, but above all, it gave birth to a certain idea of the world being potentially a global marketplace and of progress through peace and free trade.
40:31 Dan Snow? Wow, that is an extraordinary legacy for an event that must have just felt so revolutionary and exciting to live through. Thank you very much, Stephen Brindle, for coming back on the podcast and talking me through it.
40:42 Speaker 06 Dan, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
40:49 Dan Snow? Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
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