The Crystal Palace

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. You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday here https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:31Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up.

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• 1:55Dan 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.

• 2:35Dan 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

• 3:20Dan 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.

• 4:04Dan Snow?

  The poet Tennyson, the author Charles Darwin, the historian and political scientist Karl Marx.

• 4:10Dan 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

• 4:52Dan 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.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  T minus ten. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  God save the king.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  No black-white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 5:40Dan Snow?

  Stephen, great to have you back on the podcast.

• 5:41Speaker 06

  Dan, thank you very much.

• 5:43Dan 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?

• 5:54Speaker 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.

• 6:37Dan 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.

• 6:49Speaker 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.

• 7:34Speaker 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.

• 7:56Dan 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?

• 8:22Speaker 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.

• 9:04Speaker 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.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  And so it is definitely looking for overseas people to come and see what we can do. Yes, all of that.

• 9:51Dan 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.

• 10:07Speaker 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.

• 10:52Dan 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?

• 11:00Speaker 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.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  So it would merely involve the largest enclosed structure ever built in history.

• 11:49Dan 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.

• 12:06Speaker 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.

• 12:27Dan Snow?

  They had a great British institution, they had a competition.

• 12:31Speaker 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.

• 12:45Dan Snow?

  Made of iron and brick. I mean, it's a proper, proper building.

• 12:48Speaker 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.

• 13:30Dan 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.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  They had really set themselves up potentially for one massive failure was the thing.

• 13:59Dan Snow?

  I guess at this point.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Once you've announced this thing, you can't have this thing flop or go pear shaped.

• 14:05Dan Snow?

  You've announced the date, have you as well?

• 14:07Speaker 06

  I think they'd announced May 1851 for the opening by then.

• 14:10Dan 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.

• 14:25Speaker 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

• 15:07Speaker 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

• 15:49Speaker 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

• 16:31Speaker 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.

• 16:52Dan Snow?

  That's a streamlined commissioning process.

• 16:54Speaker 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.

• 17:06Dan 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.

• 17:16Speaker 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.

• 18:02Speaker 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.

• 18:43Speaker 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.

• 18:57Dan 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?

• 19:06Speaker 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.

• 19:50Speaker 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.

• 20:26Dan 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.

• 20:37Speaker 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

• 21:17Speaker 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

• 22:02Speaker 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?

• 22:46Dan Snow?

  It is hard to believe and don't tell me it was on budget. I can't cope with that.

• 22:50Speaker 06

  It was built at a total cost of eighty nine thousand pounds and their budget for the building was a hundred thousand.

• 22:55Dan Snow?

  So it was incredible speed. I came in well under the budget. Right, okay. And was it supposed to be temporary?

• 23:02Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. And it was. It was dismantled afterwards and rebuilt.

• 23:06Dan 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.

• 23:14Speaker 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.

• 23:58Speaker 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.

• 24:15Dan Snow?

  Oh, right. And how do they get rid of those?

• 24:18Speaker 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.

• 24:40Dan 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.

• 24:47Speaker 06

  Old school common sense. No one had thought of that until the Duke of Wellington was called in.

• 24:52Dan Snow?

  So the Duke of Wellington's last, his last great victory.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  Was, was over the London Sparrow, yeah, and saved the great exhibition.

• 25:00Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More on the Great Exhibition coming up after this.

• 25:12Dan Snow?

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• 25:53Dan Snow?

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• 27:06Speaker 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.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Everybody listen up.

• 27:20Speaker 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

• 27:58Dan Snow?

  ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History Hit.

• 28:15Dan 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?

• 28:25Speaker 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.

• 29:09Dan Snow?

  So she wants to go and have a proper look around all the...

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to see, too.

• 29:14Dan 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?

• 29:25Speaker 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

• 30:07Speaker 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

• 30:35Speaker 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.

• 30:52Dan Snow?

  And tell me some of the highlights and what were people talking about? What were people surprised by?

• 30:58Speaker 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.

• 31:38Dan Snow?

  Oh, the one that's still there today?

• 31:39Speaker 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.

• 32:16Dan 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?

• 32:25Speaker 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.

• 32:59Dan Snow?

  You've got tens of thousands of people going, where do they go to the toilet?

• 33:06Speaker 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.

• 33:39Dan 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.

• 33:54Speaker 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.

• 34:29Dan 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?

• 34:42Speaker 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

• 35:22Speaker 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.

• 35:28Dan Snow?

  So it was a big success.

• 35:30Speaker 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

• 36:12Speaker 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.

• 36:26Dan 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.

• 36:36Speaker 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.

• 36:51Dan 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.

• 37:02Speaker 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

• 37:44Speaker 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.

• 38:09Dan Snow?

  And also, characteristically, the Victorians, they found good use for the the building itself. They didn't just junk the whole thing.

• 38:15Speaker 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

• 38:55Speaker 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.

• 39:07Speaker 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.

• 39:43Dan Snow?

  And they remain.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  And they remain.

• 39:45Dan Snow?

  Because the rest of the building tragically doesn't.

• 39:47Speaker 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.

• 40:31Dan 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.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  Dan, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

• 40:49Dan 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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• 41:48Speaker 03

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• 42:22Dan Snow?

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